Vehicle and crew scheduling: solving large real-world instances with an integrated approach

In this paper we discuss several methods to solve large real-world instances of the vehicle and crew scheduling problem. Although, there has been an increased attention to integrated approaches for solving such problems in the literature, currently only small or medium-sized instances can be solved by such approaches. Therefore, large instances should be split into several smaller ones, which can be solved by an integrated approach, or the sequential approach, i.e. first vehicle scheduling and afterwards crew scheduling, is applied. In this paper we compare both approaches, where we consider different ways of splitting an instance varying from very simple rules to more sophisticated ones. Those ways are extensively tested by computational experiments on real-world data provided by the largest Dutch bus company.