An Integrated Optimization Model for Train Crew Management

Train crew management involves the development of a duty timetable for each of the drivers (crew) to cover a given train timetable in a rail transport organization. This duty timetable is spread over a certain period, known as the roster planning horizon. Train crew management may arise either from the planning stage, when the total number of crew and crew distributions are to be determined, or from the operating stage when the number of crew at each depot is known as input data. In this paper, we are interested in train crew management in the planning stage. In the literature, train crew management is decomposed into two stages: crew scheduling and crew rostering which are solved sequentially. We propose an integrated optimization model to solve both crew scheduling and crew rostering. The model enables us to generate either cyclic rosters or non-cyclic rosters. Numerical experiments are carried out over data sets arising from a practical application.     

多目标0-1规划问题的蜂群算法

针对多目标0-1规划问题,本文给出一种新型的智能优化算法——蜂群算法进行求解,并通过实例验证,与遗传算法、蚁群算法和元胞蚁群算法作了相应比较。就多目标0-1规划问题而言,蜂群算法能得到更多的Pareto解,说明了蜂群算法在解决该类问题上的有效性。     

基于人机交互—蚁群算法的港口疏船调度优化

为解决因港口无法正常作业导致大量船舶压港后的疏船调度问题,从同时兼顾船公司和港口方利益出发,建立了船舶平均在港时间最短、额外作业成本最低、生产秩序恢复最快的调度生产多目标优化模型。利用多属性效用理论将多目标转换为单目标,并构建了相应的评价函数,采用改进的蚁群算法并结合人机交互以及邻域搜索方法求解,最后以大连港集装箱码头实际案例进行验证。结果表明,与通常调度方法相比,文中建立的优化模型能够更好地解决疏船问题;对比常规的蚁群算法,改进后的算法搜索效率更高。上述模型和算法为集装箱码头的生产组织调度提供了新的优化思路和方法。     

Metaheuristics approach to the aircrew rostering problem

The solution of the aircrew-scheduling problem is represented by a set of rotations developed from a given set of flight segments. Once the set of rotations to be made by aircrew members has been determined, the air carrier must solve the aircrew rostering problem that entails the monthly assignment of aircrew members to planned rotations. This paper attempts to solve the aircrew rostering problem, thus constructing personalized monthly schedules using Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, and Tabu Search techniques. The developed models are tested on numerical examples that consist of constructing schedules for pilots. Dimensions of the considered examples are characteristic of small and medium-sized airlines.     

A multi-objective multi-population ant colony optimization for economic emission dispatch considering power system security

With increasing concern about global warming and haze, environmental issue has drawn more attention in daily optimization operation of electric power systems. Economic emission dispatch (EED), which aims at reducing the pollution by power generation, has been proposed as a multi-objective, non-convex and non-linear optimization problem. In a practical power system, the problem of EED becomes more complex due to conflict between the objectives of economy and emission, valve-point effect, prohibited operation zones of generating units, and security constraints of transmission networks. To solve this complex problem, an algorithm of a multi-objective multi-population ant colony optimization for continuous domain (MMACO_R) is proposed. MMACO_R reconstructs the pheromone structure of ant colony to extend the original single objective method to multi-objective area. Furthermore, to enhance the searching ability and overcome premature convergence, multi-population ant colony is also proposed, which contains ant populations with different searching scope and speed. In addition, a Gaussian function based niche search method is proposed to enhance distribution and accuracy of solutions on the Pareto optimal front. To verify the performance of MMACO_R in different multi-objective problems, benchmark tests have been conducted. Finally, the proposed algorithm is applied to solve EED based on a six-unit system, a ten-unit system and a standard IEEE 30-bus system. Simulation results demonstrate that MMACO_R is effective in solving economic emission dispatch in practical power systems.     

Two-level decomposition algorithm for crew rostering problems with fair working condition

A typical railway crew scheduling problem consists of two phases: a crew pairing problem to determine a set of crew duties and a crew rostering problem. The crew rostering problem aims to find a set of rosters that forms workforce assignment of crew duties and rest periods satisfying several working regulations. In this paper, we present a two-level decomposition approach to solve railway crew rostering problem with the objective of fair working condition. To reduce computational efforts, the original problem is decomposed into the upper-level master problem and the lower-level subproblem. The subproblem can be further decomposed into several subproblems for each roster. These problems are iteratively solved by incorporating cuts into the master problem. We show that the relaxed problem of the master problem can be formulated as a uniform parallel machine scheduling problem to minimize makespan, which is NP-hard. An efficient branch-and-bound algorithm is applied to solve the master problem. Effective valid cuts are developed to reduce feasible search space to tighten the duality gap. Using data provided by the railway company, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with that of constraint programming techniques for large-scale problems through computational experiments.     

A hybrid scatter search heuristic for personalized crew rostering in the airline industry

The crew scheduling problem in the airline industry is extensively investigated in the operations research literature since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies. Given the flight schedule of an airline company, crew scheduling is the process of assigning all necessary crew members in such a way that the airline is able to operate all its flights and constructing a roster line for each employee minimizing the corresponding overall cost for personnel. In this paper, we present a scatter search algorithm for the airline crew rostering problem. The objective is to assign a personalized roster to each crew member minimizing the overall operational costs while ensuring the social quality of the schedule. We combine different complementary meta-heuristic crew scheduling combination and improvement principles. Detailed computational experiments in a real-life problem environment are presented investigating all characteristics of the procedure. Moreover, we compare the proposed scatter search algorithm with optimal solutions obtained by an exact branch-and-price procedure and a steepest descent variable neighbourhood search.     

校车站点及线路的优化设计

以高校新校区教师校车站点及线路安排为对象,首先针对乘车站点建立了双目标非线性规划模型,其中目标函数包括乘客到达站点的距离偏差最小与所有乘客到达站点的总的距离最小两个方面;站点确定后针对车辆数最少、车辆行驶的总距离最短、各辆车的运行距离均衡及各辆车的负荷均衡这4个目标建立针对线路优化的多目标非线性规划模型,并给出了解决这类问题的启发式优化算法.与目前国内外研究相比较,该模型与算法更实际,更具体的给出了问题的解答.     

基于多阶段模糊规模效应量化的TMC模式下供应链调度优化研究

旅游大规模定制(Tourism Mass Customization, TMC)模式实施的关键是通过对旅游供应链的调度优化处理旅游活动的“规模效应”与游客“个性化需求”之间的矛盾问题。运用经济学及模糊数学的理论方法分析并实现了TMC模式下存在的多阶段模糊规模效应量化处理。构建了引入规模效应量化的服务成本最小化、引入模糊时间窗的顾客满意度最大化及供应链协同度最大化为优化目标的TMC模式下多目标供应链调度优化模型。最后,通过蚁群算法实现TMC模式下多调度优化目标的求解并对优化效果进行对比研究。研究结果表明,TMC模式下供应链调度中旅游活动存在多阶段模糊规模效应并且可以量化处理;TMC模式中的规模效应具有合理的区间范围,旅游企业应注重规模效应与其他目标的均衡;蚂蚁算法在求解TMC模式下多目标优化问题方面不仅收敛速度快,而且通过对多调度目标优化效果的对比检验表明,性能稳健优良。     

灾情巡视问题的蚁群两目标优化算法研究

分析目前灾情巡视问题求解方法存在的缺陷,归纳出灾情巡视问题两目标优化模型.针对灾情巡视问题模型特点,引入蚁群算法和多目标优化理论,提出两个灾情巡视问题的蚁群两目标优化算法:算法1将灾情巡视问题的道路网络转化为完全图,增加m-1个(m为巡视组数)虚拟巡视起点,将灾情巡视两目标优化问题转化为单旅行商两目标优化问题,然后使用蚁群算法和多目标优化理论进行迭代求解.算法2使用一只蚂蚁寻找一个子回路,m个子回路构成一个灾情巡视可行方案,采用罚函数法和多目标优化理论构建增广两目标优化评价函数,使用g组,共g×m只蚂蚁共同协作来发现灾情巡视问题的最优解.算法特点:①算法1将灾情巡视两目标优化问题转化为单旅行商两目标优化问题,可以充分利用已有蚁群算法求解单旅行商问题的研究成果;②两个算法引入蚁群算法,提高了算法效率;③两个算法克服目前灾情巡视问题的求解方法不严密性缺陷;④两目标优化算法可以为用户提供多个满足约束条件的Pareto组合解,扩大了用户选择范围,增强了算法的适用性.算法测试表明:灾情巡视问题的蚁群两目标优化算法是完全可行和有效的.     

A taxonomy and an empirical analysis of multiple objective ant colony optimization algorithms for the bi-criteria TSP

The difficulty to solve multiple objective combinatorial optimization problems with traditional techniques has urged researchers to look for alternative, better performing approaches for them. Recently, several algorithms have been proposed which are based on the ant colony optimization metaheuristic. In this contribution, the existing algorithms of this kind are reviewed and a proposal of a taxonomy for them is presented. In addition, an empirical analysis is developed by analyzing their performance on several instances of the bi-criteria traveling salesman problem in comparison with two well-known multi-objective genetic algorithms.     

A Flexible, Fast, and Optimal Modeling Approach Applied to Crew Rostering at London Underground

We present a general modeling approach to crew rostering and its application to computer-assisted generation of rotation-based rosters (or rotas) at the London Underground. Our goals were flexibility, speed, and optimality, and our approach is unique in that it achieves all three. Flexibility was important because requirements at the Underground are evolving and because specialized approaches in the literature did not meet our flexibility-implied need to use standard solvers. We decompose crew rostering into stages that can each be solved with a standard commercial MILP solver. Using a 167 MHz Sun UltraSparc 1 and CPLEX 4.0 MILP solver, we obtained high-quality rosters in runtimes ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes within 2% of optimality. Input data were takes from different depots with crew sizes ranging from 30–150 drivers, i.e., with number of duties ranging from about 200–1000. Using an argument based on decomposition and aggregation, we prove the optimality of our approach for the overall crew rostering problem.     

Fuzzy criteria for feature selection

The presence of less relevant or highly correlated features often decrease classification accuracy. Feature selection in which most informative variables are selected for model generation is an important step in data-driven modeling. In feature selection, one often tries to satisfy multiple criteria such as feature discriminating power, model performance or subset cardinality. Therefore, a multi-objective formulation of the feature selection problem is more appropriate. In this paper, we propose to use fuzzy criteria in feature selection by using a fuzzy decision making framework. This formulation allows for a more flexible definition of the goals in feature selection, and avoids the problem of weighting different goals is classical multi-objective optimization. The optimization problem is solved using an ant colony optimization algorithm proposed in our previous work. We illustrate the added value of the approach by applying our proposed fuzzy feature selection algorithm to eight benchmark problems.     

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

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.     

启发式蚁群算法及其在高填石路堤稳定性分析中的应用

模仿蚁群之群体行为而发展起来的蚁群算法 ( ACA) ,目前多用于求解组合优化问题 .为了让 ACA能求解复杂边坡工程问题 ,本文对蚁群算法的结构和蚂蚁转移概率的确定方法进行改进 ,得到一个新的评价复杂边坡稳定性的方法——启发式蚁群算法 ( HACA) ,探讨了 HACA在高填石路堤稳定性分析中的应用 .     

服务大规模定制模式下的供应链调度优化

为了提升服务大规模定制(SMC)模式下供应链系统的运作柔性,应对客户较强的多样化需求特征,本文在对服务定制特征分析、服务阶段界定以及服务规模效应探讨的基础上,指出SCM模式下的供应链调度问题是一个典型的随机需求与随机资源约束的多目标动态优化问题。研究了SMC模式下供应链调度的优化目标与约束条件,建立了完整的随机多目标动态调度优化数学模型。基于SMC运作的特点,运用改进的蚁群算法对调度问题进行了求解。最后,通过实例分析了模型及算法的可行性、有效性及适用性。     

Algorithms for railway crew management

Crew management is concerned with building the work schedules of crews needed to cover a planned timetable. This is a well-known problem in Operations Research and has been historically associated with airlines and mass-transit companies. More recently, railway applications have also come on the scene, especially in Europe. In practice, the overall crew management problem is decomposed into two subproblems, called crew scheduling and crew rostering. In this paper, we give an outline of different ways of modeling the two subproblems and possible solution methods. Two main solution approaches are illustrated for real-world applications. In particular we discuss in some detail the solution techniques currently adopted at the Italian railway company, Ferrovie dello Stato SpA, for solving crew scheduling and rostering problems.     

公交枢纽内始发线路优化配置模型及其模拟退火算法

城市公交枢纽由于用地规模有限、公交线路集中,其内部始发站的设置不同于一般的公交首末站.本文提出了公交枢纽内始发站的布置方法,建立了公交线路和站台间优化配置模型,并提出运用模拟退火算法对模型进行求解.最后通过实例分析了提出的优化模型及解法的有效性.     

0-1背包问题的蜂群优化算法

在项目决策与规划、资源分配、货物装载、预算控制等工作中,提出了0-1背包问题.0-1背包问题是组合优化中的典型NP难题,根据群集智能原理,给出一种基于蜂群寻优思想的新算法—蜂群算法,并针对0-1背包问题进行求解.经实验仿真并与蚁群算法计算结果作对比,验证了算法在0-1背包问题求解上的有效性和更快的收敛速度.