ABSTRACT
The functional diagram of atypical transit operations planning process, Figure 1.2, ends its fourth and last planning activity with crew scheduling, the aim being to assign driversaccording to the outcome of vehicle scheduling. This activity is often called driver run cutting (splitting and recombining vehicle blocks into legal driver duties, shifts, runs, or assignments). Part of avehicle block is called aduty piece or atask. This crew assignment process must comply with some constraints, which are usually dependent on alabor contract.The purpose of the assignment function is to determine afeasible set of driver duties in an optimal manner. Usually, the objective is to minimize the cost of duties so that each
duty piece is included in one of the selected duties. It should be noted that vehicle-scheduling activity for railways is not cumbersome; however, it is important to consider how to build the work schedule of the train crews (drivers and conductors together) efciently.
