Planning Routes and Shifts Driving for a Small Business of Road Passenger Transport

Abstract

The presented work is done for a company that currently operates twenty lines of passenger transport in the metropolitan area of Seville. The planning of these was originally carried out manually, building routes and shifts in an Excel spreadsheet. In order to automate the process as much as possible. It was designed and implemented by a scheduling algorithm that would be much simple than other algorithms in the literature and that, in addition, would make it possible to allow mixing vehicles and drivers between the lines. The objective was, firstly, to employ the minimum number of drivers; then, it was to try to use the least possible number of vehicles; finally, the study tried to reduce as much as possible the amount of split shifts. In addition, restrictions on the design of routes and shifts were added. At all times the service frequencies remained above the set limit. To allow the possibility of unexpected demand peaks, was established in the capacity of each route some slack.