Evaluating crew rostering alternatives for the Milan area

The design of the crews rosters for a given railway timetable is a complex process which involves several technical and contractual constraints. In this study we analysed how the introduction of new contractual amendments to the employment contracts currently in use at Trenord can open to different rostering options.

We evaluated the effectiveness of alternative contractual solutions to reduce the operational costs for the company together with our partners in this study, Steer Bologna Office (Italy) and Studio Legale Massimo Malena & associate (Rome, Italy), which helped to define the legal constraints. We took advantage of the TRENOcrew module, which permits to automatically generate crew rosters optimised for the service requirements thanks to an embedded meta-heuristic algorithm. TRENOcrew was also used to analyze the rosters through a set of efficiency KPIs. Thus using the same service timetable for reference, we were able to generate a set of rosters for each contractual alternative leading to the identification of the most effective solution.