CREWS tools

SISCOG's applications are based on a standard tested software, CREWS. CREWS is a highly sophisticated tool for crew planning and management, providing a large amount of functionality, organised in a modular and integrated architecture. CREWS provides a high degree of flexibility for adapting to a multitude of realities and operating environments.


CREWS addresses the following stages of planning and management:

- Long-Term Planning: generation of a plan without taking into account neither names of resources (but rather the skills) nor dates where the work is being planned (but rather the frequency of the work). Long-term planning is performed by the Duty Scheduler (that produces duties) and the Roster Scheduler (that produces base rosters).

- Assignment of particular resources to weeks in the base roster. This allocation is perfomed by the Staff Allocator.

- Short-Term Planning: Deals with the irregularities that were not considered during long-term planning, such as services that operate in particular calendar days, rather than being repeated at a certain frequency. It also amends the daily plan for a certain number of calendar days because either some of the tasks have changed (for example, a change in the timetable due to track work) or because a crewmember is not available to work in a certain calendar period. Short-term planning works with particular days and with particular persons. The Short-Term Scheduler performs short-term planning.

- Dispatching: Deals with unexpected events. Is performed on the day the operation takes place. It is similar to short-term planning but works in real-time. This is done by the Real-Time Dispatcher.

- Work Recording and Reporting: Records and reports the work performed by resources, after the work has been completed. This is done by the Work Recorder & Reporter. It also reports the work done and the changes to what was planned to outside systems such as the customer personnel system and payroll system. This is done by the Short-Term Data Manager.

- Crew communications: Enable the remote communication between the information in the system and crewmembers via Internet and SMS messages.

Finally, there is still a component of CREWS which is used to manipulate all data underlying the system, being responsible for the communication with outside systems and transfers of information from outside systems to and from the database. This component is called Data Manager. The Data Manager guarantees that the other CREWS components receive correct and consistent data, and signals what must be changed in order to have the problem solved after the initial conditions have changed. The Data Manager has an explanation facility that tells which data dependencies were violated. Data consistency and completeness is very important in an environment where data is scattered among multiple departments and changes asynchronously. All concepts in CREWS, and the data corresponding to them, can be inspected and manipulated with the Data Manager.