Railway crew capacity planning problem with connectivity of schedules

We study a tactical level crew capacity planning problem in railways which determines the minimum required crew size in a region while both feasibility and connectivity of schedules are maintained. We present alternative mathematical formulations which depend on network representations of the problem. A path‐based formulation in the form of a set‐covering problem along with a column‐and‐row generation algorithm is proposed. An arc‐based formulation of the problem is solved with a commercial linear programming solver. The computational study illustrates the effect of schedule connectivity on crew capacity decisions and shows that arc‐based formulation is a viable approach.