This is a repository containing the code used for the article A Fast Exact Pricing Algorithm for the Railway Crew Scheduling Problem'. In this article, a new exact pricing algorithm is proposed, and this algorithm is compared to the fastest known exact algorithm from literature.

Abstract The railway crew scheduling problem consists of selecting a least cost set of duties that cover all tasks. Large-scale crew scheduling problems are typically solved with column generation, where in each iteration a pricing problem needs to be solved. When the duty constraints consist in a maximum duty length, a meal break constraint, and the requirement to start and end at the same crew depot, the fastest known exact pricing algorithm has O(|N|3) complexity, |N| being the number of tasks. In this work we propose an O(|N|2) exact pricing algorithm. We compare the two algorithms on randomly generated instances and show that a reduction in computation time of 95% is attained on instances of size |N|=1,250. 

This entry is a fifty-three-file data package totaling 434.3 KB, containing files in , .java, .md, .csv and .class formats.If you use this dataset, please cite: van Rossum, Bart (2022). Code: A Fast Exact Pricing Algorithm for the Railway Crew Scheduling Problem. Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Software. https://doi.org/10.25397/eur.19115759