Proceedings of the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference S. Jain, R.R. Creasey, J. Himmelspach, K.P. White, and M. Fu, eds. STRATEGIC CREW PLANNING TOOL IN RAILROAD: A DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION Kiran Chahar Clark Cheng Yudi Pranoto Norfolk Southern Corporation 1200 Peachtree St. NE Atlanta, GA 30309, USA ABSTRACT Norfolk Southern (NS) has developed a strategic crew planning tool to evaluate the impacts of crew rules changes and train service changes on crew utilization and train on-time performance. This tool has three major components, a discrete event simulator, a crew deadheading engine, and a crew pool size analyzer. A Flash based animation and reporting user interface helps users identify bottlenecks in specific areas of the rail network. This tool is integrated into a suite of planning tools used in NS. The impact of crew mark off rates on train performance is discussed in a case study. 1 INTRODUCTION Freight trains are generally operated by an engineer and a conductor. The engineers and the conductors belong to specific crew pools depending on the territories and on the types of crew pools. Every crew pool has at least one home terminal and most crew pools have one or many away from home terminals. Figure 1 below represents the crew operation between terminals. Home terminal means that the crew has a home in that city and there is no lodging cost at Home. Away-from-home terminal implies that the crew needs a lodging arrangement for resting in that city. Home and away-from-home terminals have different business rules, for example, a crew waiting excessively at an away from home terminal can claim for de- tention payment while a crew at home cannot claim for detention. Each crew pool has a set number of jobs, called turns. Each turn is filled by one crew through a job bidding process where qualified crew with highest seniority level will get the turn. The turns form a queue on a crew board, generally made up of turns of the same pool to wait for their assignment to the trains. When the train arrives at its destination, the crew will tie up at another crew board according to the crew tie up rules. After at least 10 hours of rest, the crew will be available for his/her next assignment. Above mentioned freight train operations are modeled in our strategic crew planning tool. Optimization and simulation techniques have been utilized to model train crew assignment problem. Crew assignment problem in European railroad has been mathematically modeled by splitting this prob- lem into two sub-problems of crew scheduling and crew rostering (Caprara et. al 1997). Freight train crew HOME AWAY-FROM- HOME Terminal A Terminal B Figure 1: Representation of the crew operation 3693 978-1-4577-2109-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE