A decomposition approach for the integrated vehicle-crew-roster problem with days-off pattern

•The objective of this paper is the research on optimization methodologies for a complete integration of vehicle scheduling, crew scheduling and driver rostering problems so as to develop efficient algorithms.•We have modeled the integrated vehicle-crew-roster problem as a new integer linear programming problem.•We have developed a heuristic approach based on Benders decomposition to solve the problem.•Computational experience was performed using data from two bus companies in Portugal as well as random data available in the literature.•Computational results show that the presented approach outperforms the traditional sequential approach regarding the reduction of operational costs and driver rosters balance.

The integrated vehicle-crew-roster problem with days-off pattern aims to simultaneously determine minimum cost vehicle and daily crew schedules that cover all timetabled trips and a minimum cost roster covering all daily crew duties according to a pre-defined days-off pattern. This problem is formulated as a new integer linear programming model and is solved by a heuristic approach based on Benders decomposition that iterates between the solution of an integrated vehicle-crew scheduling problem and the solution of a rostering problem. Computational experience with data from two bus companies in Portugal and data from benchmark vehicle scheduling instances shows the ability of the approach for producing a variety of solutions within reasonable computing times as well as the advantages of integrating the three problems.