A column generation based hyper-heuristic to the bus driver scheduling problem

Abstract

Public transit providers are facing continuous pressure to improve service quality and reduce operating costs. Bus driver scheduling is among the most studied problems in this area. Based on this, flexible and powerful optimization algorithms have thus been developed and used for many years to help them with this challenge. Particularly, real-life large and complex problem instances often need new approaches to overcome the computational difficulties in solving them. Thus, we propose a column generation based hyper-heuristic for finding near-optimal solutions. Our approach takes advantages of the benefits offered by heuristic method since the column selection mode is driven by a hyper-heuristic using various strategies for the column generation subproblem. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the approaches in the literature. Computational results on real-life instances are presented and discussed.