Efficient scheduling of team truck drivers in the European Union

This paper studies the problem of scheduling working hours of team drivers in European road freight transport where a sequence of λ locations must be visited within given time windows. Since April 2007 working hours of truck drivers in the European Union must comply with regulation (EC) No 561/2006. These regulations impose standard limits on the daily driving times of truck drivers and extended daily limits that may only be used twice a week for each driver. We present a depth-first-breadth-second search method which can find a feasible schedule complying with standard daily driving time limits in O (λ 2 ) time, if such a schedule exists. Furthermore, we show that this method can also be used to find schedules complying with regulation (EC) No 561/2006 if daily driving times may exceed the standard limit.