Truck Driver Scheduling and U.S. Hours of Service Regulations

Abstract

In the United States of America driving and working hours of truck drivers must comply with the hours of service regulations imposed by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Generating work plans complying with these regulations for a given sequence of locations to be visited is a non-trivial task if the service time at these locations is time constrained. For a planning horizon of one week this paper presents an O(\lambda^3) algorithm for problems in which each location must be visited within one of multiple time windows if the gap between these time windows is at least 10 hours. This situation occurs, for example, if, because of opening hours of docks, handling operations can only be performed weekdays between 8 hours and 22 hours. Furthermore, this paper presents a heuristic approach for scheduling driving and working hours of truck drivers for planning horizons of more than one week.