Siscog was awarded at the 13th edition of CASPT – Conference on Advanced Systems in Public Transport, for a paper developed jointly with the Netherlands Railways (NS).
The joint paper, titled “Security crew scheduling at Netherlands Railways”, focuses on flexible and optimised planning of security teams supervising the Dutch railway trains and stations. The presence of these teams is vital as it makes passengers less prone to troublemaking, besides discouraging rides without a ticket, which corresponds to the mitigation of security and fare evasion risks, respectively.
Planning the work of these teams is challenging due to several reasons. First, the optimization goal in itself is defined in terms that are more qualitative than quantitative. Second, the choice of work assignments is performed among many possible alternatives in a network. For instance, each security team has millions of possible alternative work assignments, a lot of those unnecessarily overlapping with the work assignments of other teams.
“We are very proud to have been recognised by our peers for our innovative work in the field of planning railway companies’ personnel, a constant at Siscog,” says João Pavão Martins, Siscog’s CEO, “and even more in cooperation with NS, a company well known also for its research and development efforts to obtain the best planning solutions”, he adds.
