Tactical crew planning in railways

► We study the tactical level crew capacity planning problem. ► We develop a layered network representation to consider the day-off constraint. ► An integrated decision making approach performs better than a sequential approach. ► We consider a more strategic level problem that includes multiple crew regions. ► The real life data shows that the new approaches bring substantial improvements. Tactical crew capacity planning problem in railways involves finding the minimum number of crews in a region required to operate a predetermined set of train duties satisfying the strict day-off requirement for crew. For the single-region problem, we develop two solution approaches based on a space–time network representation: the sequential approach and the integrated approach. We also study the multi-regional capacity planning problem where we minimize total system-wide capacity by simultaneously considering multiple regions within a neighborhood search algorithm based on our solution methods for the single-region problem. We present the computational study on problem instances from Turkish State Railways.