Routing school bus for better student learning

Abstract

School Bus Routing (SBR) is a typical instance of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). Meanwhile SBR has unique and important objectives, such as safety of the students and total amount of time the students stay on the bus that other VRPs usually do not need to consider. When all these factors are considered, the school bus routing problem becomes a complex combinatorial optimization issue which the traditional generic VRP algorithms are inadequate to resolve. This paper introduces a newly developed school bus routing algorithm that is designed to take into consideration of these multiple factors. By balancing out the efficiency of the bus fleet against student safety and school policies that address student learning, the algorithm presented in this paper provides a better solution to the school bus routing problem. A web based software system implementing the algorithm is developed to allow the real world application of the algorithm.