> What are you going to do when you are 10 hours from home and hit your maximum allowed to drive time?
Railroads have had to deal with that since the Hours of Service Act in 1907. After 12 hours, train crews and dispatchers are "dead on the law", and have to stop the train. The railroad tries hard to prevent that. They don't schedule people for the full 12 hours. There are crew change points. Railroads put train crews up in motels. Ferry crews around in crew vans. Once in a while a train does end up stopped for that reason, usually because some other problem tied up traffic.
Interestingly, while there's theoretical work on the Truck Driver Scheduling Problem [1], there doesn't seem to be someone offering this as a service. That might be a startup opportunity for someone.
Some railways are using "Driver Status Monitoring", which uses things like eye tracking to check the driver is alert.
Even with the best shift scheduling software, it's difficult to handle cases outside the railway company's control -- like the driver being tired because they were kept awake by external noise, stress etc when they were trying to sleep.
Railroads have had to deal with that since the Hours of Service Act in 1907. After 12 hours, train crews and dispatchers are "dead on the law", and have to stop the train. The railroad tries hard to prevent that. They don't schedule people for the full 12 hours. There are crew change points. Railroads put train crews up in motels. Ferry crews around in crew vans. Once in a while a train does end up stopped for that reason, usually because some other problem tied up traffic.
Interestingly, while there's theoretical work on the Truck Driver Scheduling Problem [1], there doesn't seem to be someone offering this as a service. That might be a startup opportunity for someone.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589631...