Driver rostering for bus transit companies

Staff scheduling has become increasingly important for both the public sector and private companies. Good rosters have many benefits for an organization, such as lower costs, more effective utilization of resources and fairer workloads and distribution of shifts. The process of constructing optimized work timetables for the personnel is an extremely demanding task. Driver rostering, preceded by vehicle scheduling and driver scheduling, is the last phase in the bus transit scheduling process. This paper presents a successful way to schedule days-off on a yearly basis and shifts on a monthly basis in one of the Finnish bus transportation companies. The days-off and shifts are scheduled using an algorithm that includes features from population-based methods, simulated annealing, tabu search and ejection-chains. The generated software has been integrated into a third-party vendor product.