Railway Crew Management

This chapter deals with railway crew management, thereby focusing on the situation at Netherlands Railways (NS). NS is the main operator of passenger trains in the Netherlands. In this context, railway crew management is the process of guaranteeing in the most efficient way that the timetabled trains are supplied with a train driver and a sufficient number of conductors, thereby satisfying all the relevant practical constraints. Crew management has long term capacity planning aspects as well as short term scheduling, rostering, and dispatching aspects. In this chapter we describe these planning and dispatching processes, thereby focusing on practical issues. We also describe the planning support tools that are used by NS to support these processes.