A mixed integer programming formulation for the truck drivers scheduling problem considering the European Union drivers rules

The legal driver rules in the European U nion defines a general framework with restrictions in driving time or working time between breaks and rest periods. These constraints must be addressed for an evaluation of any vehicle trip that met the regulation rules. For many real-world applications, the final trips have to satisfy these rules. The set of EU rules is the most complex design of trips and extension to other rules should be easy following the model we propose here. Compared to previous contributions we provide a new mixed integer linear program, which includes all the weekly rules to schedule when the sequence of visits is fixed. We also provide a new benchmark with detailed optimal solutions. Based on a set of numerical experiments, we discuss the relevance of different simplifications in the model used in the literature.