A simulated annealing solution method for robust school bus routing

Abstract

The school bus routing problem (SBRP) deals with finding optimal bus routes for carrying students from bus stops to school. Most previous literature on SBRP are mainly focused on models in which it is tried to include as many real-life objectives and constraints as possible. However, they have not considered uncertainty in some parameters in real cases. As a modelling methodology, combined with computational tools, robust optimisation is employed to process optimisation problems in which the data are uncertain and belong to some uncertainty set. In this paper, a robust optimisation model for SBRP with uncertainty in times associated with moving from one bus stop to another is developed. In addition, a solution methodology based on simulated annealing algorithm, is presented for solving the proposed model. To evaluate the solution method and to illustrate its efficiency in real-life problems, a real-world case is studied.