Interview Analysis Interviews with Bus Companies

Abdul Samad Shibghatullah 35 30052008 A crew related problem is if a crew comes late for a duty, then the duty will be reassigned to another crew that is available at that time. When the original crew comes they will be assigned to a different duty. However, if a crew member does not come at all then the duty will be assigned to a standby crew at the garage. Company A has a policy that the number of spare drivers should be at least 20 of the total number. Other companies did not provide any specific figures for this. If a crew is sick on duty, which happens quite often according to company A, then heshe has to change at a depot or a relief point or nearest stop whatever possible. The spare crew will then take over the remaining duty. If a bus has a problem then it will be substituted with any available bus at that moment or spare bus. If a bus breaks down during the journey, then the bus has to stop at the nearest stop and the supervisor will be contacted. A replacement bus will be sent from the nearest depot. Company A has a policy that spare buses should be at least 20 of total buses. Other companies did not provide a specific figure for this. According to objective three – regarding tools or software that assist in managing and controlling the UE problem – there are tools such as radio, AVL Automatic Vehicle Locator and GPS Global Positioning System. These tools only help in locating buses and communicating with crews. However, there is no software or tool that assists the supervisor to adjust the affected schedule. Any adjustment or reassignment is done manually. Available scheduling packages do not offer this feature as they can only perform total rescheduling. According to objective four – concerning using technology to help in managing unpredictable events – all of the respondents agree that it is a good idea to have a dynamic schedule that is able to perform rescheduling for only the particular time or disrupted day. However, one of the interviewees indicated the difficulty of achieving this, especially when using traditional algorithms, due to the complexity of the problem.

2.4.3 Interview Analysis

There are a number of lessons that could be learned from these interviews. For example, most bus companies have more or less similar codes of operation. The crew schedules produced by schedulers are mostly based on scheduling packages such as Trapeze Abdul Samad Shibghatullah 36 30052008 Company B, IMPACS Company A and CAP GEMINI Company C, each with the sole objective of achieving an optimum schedule. Once such a schedule is produced then it is up to the supervisors to manage the schedule manually. The supervisor has various responsibilities. The main responsibility is to make sure that all buses run on time based on the predetermined schedule. The bus company has to comply with the schedule that has been agreed upon with the TFL. If the company does not perform well, the contract will be suspended. Other than that, the supervisor has to manage the schedules concerning times, crew, and rota crew rosters, manage the crews themselves, and the buses in everyday operation. These responsibilities are immensely hard especially when dealing with UE. All companies agree that UE are likely to take place every day and every time. As mentioned in the previous section, the event can be caused by problems related to traffic, crew or vehicle. As Company C claimed, no two days are the same and Friday is probably the most likely day for such unforeseen events such as marching, accidents or bad traffic congestion to occur. There is no absolute solution, which means they have to manage the problem case-by-case. Abdul Samad Shibghatullah 37 30052008 Figure 2.3: Supervisor Manages the Unpredictable Events in Everyday Operation Based on the interviews, the role of a supervisor in dealing with UE is illustrated in Figure 2.2. The supervisor has time schedules, crew schedules, and ROTA schedules. Time schedules show the movement of each bus, time against location, while crew schedules show the activity for every duty from sign-in to sign-off. ROTA schedules show which person is assigned to what duty. Then the supervisor has to manage resources i.e. crews and buses. When a certain UE problem occurs, the supervisor must perform appropriate adjustments to the schedule or change resource allocation. Time and crew schedules will remain the same. Only re-allocation or reassignment is done to cover the schedule. For instance, if a bus is broken down then a spare bus will be allocated to cover the remaining schedule. Similarly, if a crew is not coming, then his duty will be assigned to a spare crew. Abdul Samad Shibghatullah 38 30052008 Although there are a number of management tools, for example, Automatic Vehicle Location AVL, a supervisor still has to manage buses and crews properly to make sure that all buses run on a predetermined schedule. AVL is an automatic tool that is able to pinpoint the location of a vehicle in operation. According to Company C, AVL can give you the location but not the reason. For example, if Bus A is 15 minutes late, the AVL screen pinpoints its exact location, however, it does not provide the supervisor the reason for that delay. Heshe has to contact the crew by radio to know the reason. As mentioned earlier, existing crew scheduling systems only provide optimum schedules and do not support the process of real-time rescheduling, whilst rescheduling activities are done manually. However, when UE problems occur, they disrupt such optimum schedules. Manually tackling such problems is usually hard and making decisions is slow, prone to error and not optimum. This necessitates the need for a system that supports the process of rescheduling to help supervisors in dealing with day-to-day operational problems concerning crew. Two issues have been discussed in this section - the UE problem and the role of supervisors in managing such events. The first issue shows that the crew is one of the main sources of disruptive events and has a substantial effect on the crew schedule, thus everyday operations. The second issue is that the supervisor plays a major role in managing UE and crew rescheduling is a way of dealing with such events, which currently is done manually. To tackle the above issues, this research proposes an automated crew rescheduling using a MAS that is able to reschedule crew in real-time. The definition and descriptions of a MAS is provided in Section 2.5. Chapter Three will discuss details of the proposed system.

2.5 MAS Approach