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L. Kletzander, N. Musliu, P. Van Hentenryck:
"Branch and Price for Bus Driver Scheduling with Complex Break Constraints";
Talk: 35th AAAI 2021, virtual event; 2021-02-02 - 2021-02-09; in: "Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2021, Thirty-Third Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, {IAAI} 2021, The Eleventh Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, {EAAI} 2021, Virtual Event, February 2-9, 2021", (2021), 11853 - 11861.

This paper presents a Branch and Price approach for a real-life Bus Driver Scheduling problem with a complex set of break constraints. The column generation uses a set partitioning model as master problem and a resource constrained shortest path problem as subproblem. Due to the complex constraints, the branch and price algorithm adopts several novel ideas to improve the column generation in the presence of a high-dimensional subproblem, including exponential arc throttling and a dedicated two-stage dominance algorithm. Evaluation on a publicly available set of benchmark instances shows that the approach provides the first provably optimal solutions for small instances, improving best-known solutions or proving them optimal for 48 out of 50 instances, and yielding an optimality gap of less than 1% for more than half the instances.

Scheduling, Transportation, Constraint Optimization, Applications

Project Head Nysret Musliu:
ARTIOS