The DSP consists of selecting a set of duties (assignments) for the drivers or pilots of vehicles (e.g., buses, trains, boats, or planes) involved in the transportation of passengers or goods,[1][2] within the constraints of various legislative and logistical criteria.
This very complex problem involves several constraints related to labour and company rules and also different evaluation criteria and objectives.
Being able to solve this problem efficiently can have a great impact on costs and quality of service for public transportation companies.
[3] There is a large number of different rules that a feasible duty might be required to satisfy, such as Operations research has provided optimization models and algorithms that lead to efficient solutions for this problem.
The DSP resolution, based on either of these models, is the selection of the set of feasible duties that guarantees that there is one (SPP) or more (SCP) duties covering each work piece while minimizing the total cost of the final schedule.