Rural School Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

The school bus routing problem traditionally has been defined in an urban context. However, because of the unique attributes of the problem in rural areas, traditional heuristic methods for solving the problem may produce impractical results. In many cases, these characteristics also provide the opportunity to investigate what size and mix of vehicles, whether large or small buses, conforming vans, or other modes, are most efficient. In addition, these vehicles may be further differentiated by the presence of equipment for transporting students with special needs. To address this situation, a mathematical model of the problem was constructed and a new heuristic was developed. This heuristic consists of two parts: constructing the initial route and then improving it by using a fixed tenure tabu search algorithm. This rural routing heuristic, in addition to several existing ones, is then applied to a randomly generated school district with rural characteristics. For the relevant measure, a function of student ride time, the new heuristic provides a set of routes superior to those produced by existing methods. Because ride times produced by the new heuristic are lower than those for routes generated by existing methods, the likelihood of injury to students may decrease. Also, with the cost of operation for each route calculated in dollars, a comparison of solutions in financial, as well as temporal, terms is possible.

Balanced Scheduling of School Bus Trips using a Perfect Matching Heuristic

“…The SBSP might then be approached through different practical objectives; one might be solely interested in maximizing profit (minimizing costs), while others take measures of the equity of service (fairness) and level of service into account. The most common objective functions are the minimization of total travel distance or time, the total number of trips, and the total cost that is the combination of the aggregate travel distance and number of trips (10)(11)(12)(13)(14). Setting aside the fixed costs for each trip, the bus operational/variable cost is directly related to the total travel distance.…”

Development of a Genetic Algorithm for the School Bus Routing Problem

“…Among them are studies that addressed the Heterogeneous Fleet (HT) problem, in which there were heterogeneous buses in terms of the characteristics of vehicles. In relation to this, Thangiah et al, [25] solved the problem based on an assumption that the numbers of students that could be picked up by different vehicles would be different, while Ripplinger [21] solved the problem assuming that there were buses that could pick up students with special needs and those that could not pick up that students.…”

A Survey of Transportation Problems

“…Branch-and-Bound method [93] Vehicle routing problem with time windows A Branch-and-Bound method to solve VRPTW. [94] School bus routing problem Constructing the initial route and then improving it by using a fixed tenure Tabu search algorithm.…”