KASTOR – a vehicle and crew scheduling system for regular bus passenger transport

The challenge in vehicle and crew scheduling is to arrange a given set of bus trips into running boards while minimizing certain objectives and complying with a given set of constraints. This scheduling was solved several tens years ago manually by a dispatcher who used his skill, experience, knowledge of history, and intuition. This attitude worked quite well in small instances but could not be applied in larger ones. Development of computers brought opportunities to build computerized vehicle and crew optimization systems. This paper describes a computer system KASTOR developed for vehicle and crew optimization, which complies with the special requirements of Czech and Slovak bus providers, and is significantly different from those in some west European countries.