TransportAndMobility HowTo Quintiq FleetAndCrewPlanner 

The optimizer is a powerful and helpful tool to generate crew duties for a set of crew requirements. However, it is also important that the result that is generated is workable. One of the relevant aspects there is the number of crew duties generated for each crew depot. If more crew duties are generated for a crew depot than the number of crew that is available at the depot, the result cannot be used. To steer the optimizer to a fitting result, the maximum number of crew duties for a crew depot can be defined on the crew depot itself in the System Maintenance client. But did you know it is also possible to overrule this value in the planning client itself for a particular standard week, allowing you to further steer the optimizer result and balance the number of crew duties over the various crew depots? Let's take a look at an example how to do that.

In above screenshot a first result of an optimizer run is shown where 24 crew duties have been generated for depot LocoCity. However, in total there are only 37 crew duties which would put relatively a too high load on this depot, therefore the planner decides to set a desired number of 20 crew duties for LocoCity. He does that by opening the context menu on the standard weeks and depots list, while selecting depot LocoCity.

After overriding the maximum number of crew duties for LocoCity to 20 a constraint violation appears, indicating too many (24) crew duties are planned for LocoCity.

He starts the optimizer again, checking also the optimizer weights to ensure a heavy weight is set for avoiding too many crew duties being generated for a crew depot.

Continuing the optimizer run a new solution is proposed by the optimizer where now only 20 crew duties are selected for the crew depot at LocoCity.

This shows how input to the optimizer can be adjusted to steer it towards a solution with a desired number of crew duties for each of the crew depots.