Vehicle Scheduling

Abstract

For more than five decades, the use of operations research (OR) methods for vehicle scheduling has been an essential part of operational planning in public transport companies [1]. The limitations that existed in the early years due to restrictions in hardware and software performance as well as available algorithms have been increasingly overcome in recent years, so that the planning results have become better and better from an operational point of view. However, it has often been neglected that the quality of the results is significantly influenced by the modeling, i.e., how exactly the essential content of the reality can be represented in a model in order to successfully carry out the calculations using suitable algorithms. The following section deals with the modeling and the main algorithms that are (or can be) used in vehicle scheduling. Various modifications and recent developments are then presented. The final section is a brief summary and outlook for future.