Homepage van Twan Dollevoet

Welcome to the homepage of Twan Dollevoet

News highlights

May 2025: Bart van Rossum successfully defended his Ph.D.-thesis "Optimising Fair Work Allocation: Applications in Railway Crew Planning" on May 16, 2025. The Ph.D. thesis can be found here.
October 2021: Rowan Hoogervorst successfully defended his Ph.D.-thesis "Improving the Scheduling and Rescheduling of Rolling Stock: Solution Methods and Extensions" on October 14, 2021. The Ph.D. thesis can be found here.
January 2020: Thomas Breugem successfully defended his Ph.D.-thesis "Crew Planning at Netherlands Railways: Improving Fairness, Attractiveness, and Efficiency" on January 24, 2020. The Ph.D. thesis can be found here.
September 2017: Together with Gianlorenzo D'Angelo, I chaired the program committee of ATMOS 2017, organized as part of ALGO 2017 in Vienna, Austria. We edited the proceedings of the workshop that can be found here.
July 2015: Together with several colleagues from RSM, ESE and TU/e, we organised the Conference on Advanced Systems in Public Tranpsort (CASPT) 2015 in Rotterdam. The conference attracted over 200 participants. The program contained more than 130 presentations, a boat trip through the harbor and a conference dinner at the Steamship Rotterdam.
January 2013: I successfully defended my Ph.D. Thesis "Delay Management and Dispatching in Railways" on January 10, 2013, at 13:30. My thesis can be found among my publications. After my defense, I was interviewed in Radio Labyrint, a program about science that was broadcasted on Radio 1 on Sunday January 27.

The pictures above are made by Evelien van der Hurk. (Thanks Evelien! :-)). On the left, you see me together with my paranymphs while defending my thesis. On the right I obtain my doctorate degree from my promotor Albert Wagelmans. On the right, next to the rector magnificus, you see my supervisor Dennis Huisman.

More news can be found in the archive.

Twan Dollevoet
Econometric Institute
Erasmus School of Economics
Erasmus University Rotterdam
PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Office: Campus Woudestein, E-building, T-floor, usually in ET-36
Tel.: +31 (0)10 754 5277
Email: dollevoet@ese.eur.nl

See also my LinkedIn profile, my EUR website, my ESE website, my ERIM website, my ORCID website, and my Google Scholar profile.

Publications

Accepted and published journal papers

Jia Hui Zhu, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "An Exact and Heuristic Framework for Rolling Stock Rescheduling with Railway Infrastructure Availability Constraints" (2025) Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 195:103189, download here.
Bart van Rossum, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "Railway Crew Planning with Fairness over Time" (2024) European Journal of Operational Research 318:1 pp. 55-70, download here.
Marelot de Vos, Rolf van Lieshout, and Twan Dollevoet: "Electric Vehicle Scheduling in Public Transit with Capacitated Charging Stations" (2024) Transportation Science 58:2 pp. 279-294, download here.
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Twan Dollevoet and Remy Spliet: "Preprocessing to reduce vehicle capacity for routing problems" (2023) Operations Research Forum 4:42, download here.
Thomas Breugem, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "Is Equality always desirable? Analyzing the Trade-Off between Fairness and Attractiveness in Crew Rostering" (2022) Management Science 68:4 pp. 2619-2641; download here.
Thomas Breugem, Bart van Rossum, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "A Column Generation Approach for the Integrated Crew Re-Planning Problem" (2022) Omega 107:102555; download here.
Shyam Sundar Govindaraja Perumal, Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Richard M Lusby, Jesper Larsen, and Morten Riis: "Solution Approaches for Integrated Vehicle and Crew Scheduling with Electric Buses" (2021) Computers & Operations Research 132:105268; download here.
Rowan Hoogervorst, Twan Dollevoet, Gábor Maróti, and Dennis Huisman: "A Variable Neighborhood Search Heuristic for Rolling Stock Rescheduling" (2021) EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics 10:100032; download here.
Rowan Hoogervorst, Twan Dollevoet, Gábor Maróti, and Dennis Huisman: "Reducing Passenger Delays by Rolling Stock Rescheduling" (2020) Transportation Science 54:3 pp. 762-784; download here.
Gert-Jaap Polinder, Thomas Breugem, Twan Dollevoet, and Gábor Maróti: "An Adjustable Robust Optimization Approach for Periodic Timetabling" (2019) Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 128 pp. 50-68; download here.
Chongshuang Chen, Twan Dollevoet, and Jun Zhao: "One-block train formation in large-scale railway networks: An exact model and a tree-based decomposition algorithm" (2018) Transportation Research Path B: Methodological 118 pp. 1-30; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, J. Theresia van Essen, and Kristiaan M. Glorie: "Solution methods for the tray optimization problem" (2018) European Journal of Operational Research 271:3 pp. 1070-1084; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Leo G. Kroon, Lucas P. Veelenturf, and Joris C. Wagenaar: "Application of an Iterative Framework for Real-time Railway Rescheduling" (2017) Computers & Operations Research 78 pp. 203-217; download here.
Thomas Breugem, Twan Dollevoet, and Wilco van den Heuvel: "Analysis of FPTASes for the multi-objective shortest path problem" (2017) Computers & Operations Research 78 pp. 44-58; download here.
Lukas Bach, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "Integrating Timetabling and Crew Scheduling at a Freight Railway Operator" (2016) Transportation Science 50:3 pp. 878-891; download here.
Egidio Quaglietta, Paola Pellegrini, Rob M.P. Goverde, Thomas Albrecht, Birgit Jaekel, Grégory Marlière, Joaquin Rodriguez, Twan Dollevoet, Bruno Ambrogio, Daniele Carcasole, Marco Giaroli, and Gemma Nicholson: "The ON-TIME real-time railway traffic management framework: a proof-of-concept using a scalable standardised data communication architecture" (2016) Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 63 pp. 23-50; download here.
Willem van Jaarsveld, Twan Dollevoet, and Rommert Dekker: "Improving spare parts inventory control at a repair shop" (2015) Omega 57, Part B pp. 217-229; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Leo Kroon, Marie Schmidt, and Anita Schoebel: "Delay Management including Capacities of Stations" (2015) Transportation Science 49:2 pp. 185-203; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Francesco Corman, Andrea D'Ariano, and Dennis Huisman: "An iterative optimization framework for delay management and train scheduling" (2014) Flexible Services and Manufacturing 26:4 pp. 490-515; download here.
Lanah Evers, Twan Dollevoet, Ana Isabel Barros and Herman Monsuur: "Robust UAV Mission Planning" (2014) Annals of Operations Research 222:1 pp. 293-315; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "Fast Heuristics for Delay Management with Passenger Rerouting" (2014) Public Transport 6:1-2 pp. 67-84; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Marie Schmidt, and Anita Schoebel: "Delay Management with Rerouting of Passengers" (2012) Transportation Science 46:1 pp. 74-89; download here.
Erwin Abbink, Luis Albino, Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Jorge Roussado, and Ricardo Saldanha: "Solving Large Scale Crew Scheduling Problems in Practice" (2011) Public Transport 3:2 pp. 149-164; download here.

Refereed conference contributions

Thomas Breugem, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "Analyzing a Family of Formulations for Cyclic Crew Rostering" (2020) 20th Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2020); Dennis Huisman and Christos D. Zaroliagis (Eds). OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs) Volume 85, pp.7.1-7.16, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany; download here.
Gert-Jaap Polinder, Thomas Breugem, and Twan Dollevoet: "Robust Periodic Timetabling" (2017) Proceedings of the 7th international conference on railway operations modelling and analysis, RailLille2017. International Association of Railway Operations Research.
Egidio Quaglietta, Rob Goverde, Thomas Albrecht, Birgit Jaekel, Grégory Marlière, Paola Pellegrini, Joaquin Rodriguez, Twan Dollevoet, Bruno Ambrogio, Daniele Carcasole, Marco Giaroli, and Gemma Nicholson, "Optimal Management of Railway Perturbations by Means of an Integrated Support System for Real-Time Traffic Control (2015) In IA Hansen, N Tomii & C Hirai (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th international conference on railway operations modelling and analysis, RailTokyo2015. International Association of Railway Operations Research.
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Nikola Besinovic, Valentina Cacchiani, Twan Dollevoet, Rob Goverde, Dennis Huisman, Martin Kidd, Leo Kroon, Egidio Quaglietta, Joachim Rodriguez, Paolo Toth, Luuk Veelenturf, and Joris Wagenaar: "Integrated decision support tools for disruption management" (2015) In IA Hansen, N Tomii & C Hirai (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th international conference on railway operations modelling and analysis, RailTokyo2015. International Association of Railway Operations Research.
Twan Dollevoet, Marie Schmidt, and Anita Schoebel: "Delay Management including Capacities of Stations" (2011) 11th Workshop on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems; A. Caprara and S. Kontogiannis (Eds) pp. 88-99; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Marie Schmidt, and Anita Schoebel: "Delay Management with Re-Routing of Passengers" (2009) Atmos 2009 - 9th Workshop on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modeling, Optimization, and Systems; J. Clausen and G. Di Stefano (Eds); download here.

Edited volumes

Gianlorenzo D'Angelo and Twan Dollevoet: "17th Workshop on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2017)" (2017) OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs) Volume 59, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany; download here.

Chapters in books

Valentina Cacchiani, Gábor Maróti, and Twan Dollevoet: "Train Timetable Planning and Rescheduling" (2024). In: Sophie N. Parragh and Tom van Woensel (Ed.) Transport Modeling
Twan Dollevoet and Dennis Huisman: "Column Generation and Lagrangian Relaxation: Solving real-world crew (re)scheduling problems" (2024). In: F. Hamid (Ed.) Optimization Essentials: Theory, Tools, and Applications (International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, 353) pp. 297-323, Singapore: Springer; download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Dennis Huisman, Marie Schmidt, and Anita Schöbel: "Delay propagation and delay management in transportation networks" (2018). In: R. Borndörder, T. Klug, L. Lamorgese, C. Mannino, M. Reuther, and T. Schlechte (Eds.) Handbook of Optimization in the Railway Industry (International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, 268) pp. 285-317, Cham: Springer; download here.

Ph.D. thesis

Twan Dollevoet: "Delay Management and Dispatching in Railways" (2013) Ph.D. thesis, ERIM, Erasmus University Rotterdam; download here.

Professional contributions

Twan Dollevoet: "Delay Management in Railway Operations" (2010) Medium Econometrische Toepassingen, 18:1 pp. 2-5.

Working papers

Bart van Rossum, Twan Dollevoet, and Dennis Huisman: "Benders Decomposition for Robust Tactical Railway Crew Scheduling" (2024). Submitted in December 2024. Download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Diego Pecin, and Remy Spliet: "The path programming problem and a partial path relaxation" (2020). Download here.
Twan Dollevoet, Pedro Munari, and Remy Spliet: "A p-step formulation for the capacitated vehicle routing problem" (2019) Download here. A preliminary version of the paper can be found here.

Research

I am an associate professor at the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. My research focuses on applications of combinatorial optimization, most notably in transportation. For my Ph.D. thesis, I have developed several extensions of the classical delay management model. Directly thereafter, I have been working on online delay management and integrated disruption management within the European project ON-TIME. My current research interests include public transport optimization, vehicle routing, and kidney allocation. Some of my projects are described below.

Current projects

Together with Roby Cremers, Michal Mankowski (NYU Grossman School of Medicine), Joris van de Klundert (Universidad Adolfo Ibanez), and Albert Wagelmans, I am working on kidney transplantation policies. In particular, we use Monte Carlo simulation and advanced optimization methods to assess the performance of various kidney allocation policies.

Together with Danny Zhu and Dennis Huisman, I am working on rolling stock planning. In particular, we are integrating various stages in rolling stock rescheduling. As a first step, we consider the routing and scheduling of moving rolling stock units that are coupled to or uncoupled from rolling stock compositions from and to the shunting yard.

Together with Bart van Rossum and Dennis Huisman, I am working on railway crew planning. Currently, we are working on a new approach to crew scheduling, incorporating fairness at an individual level and postponing the crew scheduling decisions to a later stage. In such an approach, so-called template roster are generated well in advance, while precise duties are determined closer to the day of operation.

Together with Pedro Munari and Remy Spliet, I work on a generalized formulation for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). The generalized formulation includes the arc-flow and set partitioning formulations as special cases. A report on this research can be found among my working papers. Together with Diego Pecin and Remy Spliet, I am studying all kinds of extensions of this idea.

Past projects

Together with Rowan Hoogervorst and Dennis Huisman, I have worked on rolling stock rescheduling. First, we have incorporated delays and added rescheduling flexibility into existing approaches. Second, we have developed a heuristic for rolling stock rescheduling. Finally, we have integrated the scheduling of shunting drivers into rolling stock rescheduling. Rowan defended his Ph.D. thesis on October 14, 2021. His thesis can be downloaded here. Rowan is now a post-doc at DTU, Copenhagen.

Together with Thomas Breugem and Dennis Huisman, I have worked on railway crew planning. In particular, we have incorporated fairness aspects in the traditional crew rostering approaches. Thomas has defended his Ph.D. thesis on January 24, 2020. His thesis can be downloaded here. After obtaining his PhD, Thomas first moved to INSEAD, France. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at Tilburg University.

Shyam Sundar (DTU Denmark) has visitied Erasmus University Rotterdam during the Spring and Summer of 2019. Together with Shyam, Dennis Huisman, Richard Lusby, Jesper Larsen, and Morten Riis, we have developed an ALNS algorithm for the problem of simultaneously scheduling electrical buses and drivers. Integrating the electrical vehicle and crew scheduling leads to significant improvements with respect to a sequential approach. Our work is published in Computers & Operations Research and can be found here.

From November 2016 to November 2017, dr. Chongshuang Chen from Southwest Jiaotong University has visited Erasmus University Rotterdam. Together, we worked on a novel algorithm for the train formation problem. We developed both an exact algorithm and a tree-based decomposition heuristic. A paper on our research is published in Transportation Research Path B: Methodological and can be downloaded here

Lukas Bach, a Ph.D. student at Aarhus University, has visited Erasmus University Rotterdam several times since April 2013. Together with Lukas and Dennis Huisman, I have worked on the integration of train timetabling, engine routing and crew scheduling for a real-world case of DB Schenker, Rail Scandinavia. By allowing for some flexibility in the timetale, the overall costs of the timetable and crew schedule could be reduced by 6-8 percent. A paper on this research has been published in Transportation Science and can be found here.

As a Ph.D. student, I have collaborated with some of my fellow Ph.D. students. Together with Willem van Jaarsveld, I have looked into an algorithm to solve multi-item inventory problems. We have written a paper on this project that has been published in Omega. Together with Lanah Evers, I have been working on robust solutions to the orienteering problem. Our paper on this research is published in a special issue of Annals of Operations Research. Together with Kristiaan Glorie and Theresia van Essen, I have studied the Tray Optimization Problem (TOP). Here, sterile intruments must be grouped into nets and are then assigned to surgeries. A paper on this research is published in European Journal of Operational Research.

When I was a Ph.D. student, I have worked part-time on crew scheduling at Netherlands Railways (NS). In cooperation with SISCOG, we have developed an algorithm that can tackle the crew scheduling problem for a whole week at once. One of the main results is a crew scheduling algorithm that can solve complete week instances both for drivers and for guards. A paper on this algorithm has been published in Public Transport.