Simulating a new crew planning process at Netherlands Railways

Netherlands Railways is considering a shift towards a novel crew planning process featuring individual Sharing-Sweet-and-Sour rules, designed to provide each crew member with a fair and varied work schedule. This approach replaces the current, crew base-level fairness mechanisms. In the new process, template-based rosters specify generic time windows, to which personalised duties are assigned in the operational phase. To evaluate the feasibility of the novel process, we develop a scalable simulation framework that accurately models the operational crew planning phase. The framework features a column generation heuristic to construct personalised duties, a network decomposition strategy to reduce computing times, and stochastically generated disruptions to simulate daily operations. Simulating the process for 3265 guards throughout the year 2024, we find high conformance with the proposed individual Sharing-Sweet-and-Sour rules, with over 93% compliance for four out of six attributes. Our results yield valuable inputs for ongoing discussions with the works council and provide company experts with a powerful strategic tool. These insights are relevant to other transport operators, showing that fair and attractive individual work schedules can be constructed and highlighting the practical benefits of tailored simulation tools.