Scheduling Working Hours of Team Drivers in European Road Transport

Since April 2007 working hours of truck drivers in the European Union must comply with regulation (EC) No 561/2006. According to the new regulation, transport companies must organise the work of drivers in a way that drivers are able to comply with the regulation and can be made liable for infringements committed by the drivers. Although of particular importance in long-distance haulage, regulations on working hours of truck drivers have only received very little attention in the scheduling literature. Generating work plans complying with these regulations is a non-trivial task if service times at the locations to be visited is time constrained. This paper presents an algorithm for scheduling problems in which a team of two drivers must visit a sequence of locations within given time windows. Computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.