TPAC Rostering is the module of the TPAC suite used for staff rostering. TPAC is a suite designed to provide planning and operations control capabilities for crew and equipment in transport applications.
Rostering is the process of allocation of activities to staff, where in general an activity is some work that starts and ends at the same location. In a transport application, many activities consist of a crew pairing - that is a crew operating or travelling on a series of vehicles starting and ending at the crew's base and travelling to a range of locations in between. For long haul applications, a pairing may consist of multiple duties with intervening rests at hotels.
Rostering of crew pairings often involves extra complexities compared with more standard rostering. This occurs where complex legislative or industrial rules require consideration of the types of duties within crew pairings.
For example, in long haul transport applications there are often limitations specifying the minimum rest requirements in a sliding window of a week, month or even a year that can overlap several activities. Travel across time zones may require extra acclimatisation such that two activities with large time zone shifts may require extra rest between them. Industrial awards may guarantee limits in the number of activities visiting a particular location in a rostering period, etc.
Furthermore, staff may wish to express preferences for pairings that include travel to certain locations, or duties with certain characteristics.
Rostering for transport applications thus requires knowledge of details of each crew pairing and the ability to configure rules that take these details into account. Activities that are not crew pairings must also be catered for (e.g. training, standby, leave), and thus the resulting system must handle both standard rostering requirements and the extra requirements for rostering of crew pairings.
TPAC Rostering has been designed to handle all rostering requirements for transport applications, including:
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Crew pairing allocation
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Leave allocation
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Training allocation
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Standby/reserve duty allocation
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Day off allocation
Allocation can follow strict precedence (e.g. granting bids by seniority), or use fair share algorithms to allocate a fair share or weighted fair share of activities. To support this, TPAC Rostering incorporates two types of solver:
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The Sequential Solver allocates activities to crew in a strict sequential order (typically to the most senior crew first). This solver is typically used in a situation where staff bid for activities, and strict rules govern priority when awarding bids.
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The Preferential Fair Share solver allocates activities so as to maintain a fair share according to criteria which may incorporate crew preferences. The definition of "fair" is configurable, and can incorporate elements such as staff seniority to allow for situations where some staff are more equal than others.
A run can incorporate any number of passes of either solver with selectable rules for each pass. This allows for complex rostering requirements such as:
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Allocation of activities to full time staff in the first pass, and remaining activities to casual staff in a second pass.
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Allocation of activities requiring special skills (languages, instructor) in a first pass, followed by remaining activities in the next pass.
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Allocation of activities with a given per-staff member roster period limit in a first pass, with following passes then allocating any remaining activities up to larger limits.
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Fully configurable using the CTI Common Rules rule management system.
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Loadable from a central repository or configurable per run to allow "what if" scenario testing.
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All classes of rules are user configurable:
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Legality rules.
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Rules determining priorities of crew bids and preferences.
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Rules determining rostering algorithm limits and behaviour.
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Penalties may be added to allow soft rules and to indicate desirable properties of solutions.
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Allows checking of rules based on duties and legs within activities to cater for complex rest and maximum duty rules requiring consideration of multiple activities.
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Suitable for large problems (thousands of staff).
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Scalable for solution of problems on multiple CPUs and/or machines.
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UNIX (e.g. Linux or SUN/Solaris) server with standard XML interface.
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Oracle ReportsTM.
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Optional user interfaces.
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The user interface allows the user to perform a number of runs with different rostering limits and to then compare the results to select the run with the desired result. Multiple simultaneous runs can be performed, and run progress can be monitored in real time.
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Further Information
You may also wish to read the brochure ( 
).