Vehicle and Crew Scheduling for Flexible Bus Transportation Systems

•Drivers duty and Vehicles usage directly affects the operation costs of bus transportation agencies.•We introduce a new integration of the Vehicle Scheduling Problem (VSP) and the Crew Scheduling Problem (CSP).•The integration of the VSP and the CSP provides a more flexible transportation system and aims to reduce the overall operation cost.•We do not consider a fixed duty structure, and we include labor regulation constraints for the daily duty of the drivers.•The proposed Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm can provide high quality solution in a short processing time for the real size instances.