The OC Transpo bus fleet includes approximately 1,000 vehicles, which primarily consist of forty-foot “standard”, sixty-foot “articulated” buses and double-deckers. There is also a very small and simple rail operation undergoing expansion. Several things make scheduling at OC Transpo a unique challenge.

First on the vehicle scheduling side, they provide a vast network of very high-frequency BRT services on a network of dedicated bus way corridors with rail-like characteristics. Next, in building vehicle blocks they rotate their buses between garages to make use of specialized maintenance provisions at each location. Schedulers must ensure these rotations are balanced, much like rail schedulers must ensure rail cars are balanced between terminals.

On the crew scheduling side, there are no part-time operators. Different categories of operators have different thresholds of guaranteed work, and these thresholds differ according to the number of off-days picked by operators over a 2-week period (4, 5 or 6 off-days per two-week period).

CSched’s project work at OC Transpo follows much the same process as the description of work for King County Metro in Seattle (see project description). CSched staff members have worked alongside the schedulers at OC Transpo to assist them in achieving a more informed and productive use of the HASTUS-ATP, the Minbus and the CrewOpt optimization tools.