Multi-objective integrated acyclic crew rostering and vehicle assignment problem in public bus transportation

In this study, we try to solve a real planning problem faced in public bus transportation. It is a multi‐objective integrated crew rostering and vehicle assignment problem. We model this problem as a multi‐objective set partitioning problem. Most of the time, crew rostering problem with a single‐objective function is considered, and the output may not satisfy some transport companies. To minimize the cost and maximize the fairness of the workload among the drivers, we define many criteria. Although crew rostering problem and its integrated versions appear in the literature, it is the first time these two problems are integrated. We propose a new multi‐objective tabu search algorithm to obtain near Pareto‐optimal solutions. The algorithm works with a set of solutions using parallel search. We test our algorithm for the case with ten objectives and define a method to choose solutions from the approximated efficient frontier to present to the user. We discuss the performance of our meta‐heuristic approach.