A review of integrated approaches for optimizing electric vehicle and crew schedules

In the public bus transport industry, the vehicle and crew scheduling problems are the primary drivers of cost. Given a set of timetabled trips, the vehicle scheduling problem (VSP) assigns buses to the timetabled trips such that every trip is covered by a bus and the objective is to minimize the operational cost based on bus usage. A duty is dened as the work of a bus driver for a day and the crew scheduling problem (CSP) is concerned with determining sets of duties to cover all scheduled bus trips. The objective of the CSP is to minimize total wages paid to the drivers while satisfying numerous labor union rules. The multiple depot VSP and CSP are NP-hard problems and have been extensively studied in the Operations Research (OR) literature. However, practitioners often apply a sequential approach that nds the vehicle schedule rst before nding the crew schedule. Simultaneously handling the vehicle and crew scheduling aspects could lead to further reduction
of operational cost. This paper discusses the models and solution methods reported in the OR literature for integrating the VSP and CSP. Furthermore, particular attention is given to electric buses. The use of electric bus technologies is expected to increase in the coming years due to its signicant environmental benets. The aim of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners an overview of the existing research on integrating the two scheduling problems and the electric bus technologies that could oer valuable insights and perspectives for future research.