School bus routing using genetic algorithms (original) (raw)
Related papers
The school bus routing problem: A review
European Journal of Operational Research, 2010
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the school bus routing problem (SBRP). SBRP seeks to plan an efficient schedule for a fleet of school buses where each bus picks up students from various bus stops and delivers them to their designated schools while satisfying various constraints such as the maximum capacity of a bus, the maximum riding time of a student in a bus, and the time window of a school. This class of problem consists of different sub-problems involving data preparation, bus stop selection, bus route generation, school bell time adjustment, and bus scheduling. In this paper, the various assumptions, constraints, and solution methods used in the literature on SBRP are summarized. A list of issues requiring further research is also presented.
School bus routing problem: Contemporary trends and research directions
Omega, 2019
The school bus routing problem (SBRP) is a challenging operations research problem that has been studied by researchers for almost 50 years. SBRP publications address one or more operational sub-problems, including: bus stop selection, bus route generation, bus route scheduling, school bell time adjustment, and strategic transportation policy issues. This paper reviews 64 new SBRP research publications and analyzes them by sub-problem type, problem characteristics and solution approach. The impact of key SBRP characteristics (number of schools, mixed load, fleet mix, service environment, objective and constraints) are discussed and the different solution approaches to the SBRP are summarized by sub-problem type and methodology. We found in recent years, SBRP researchers are examining more complex real-world problem settings, adopting both evolutionary-based and trajectory-based metaheuristic solution approaches, and considering ridership and travel time uncertainty. This review documents recent trends in SBRP research and highlights research gaps and promising opportunities for future SBRP research.
Development of a Genetic Algorithm for the School Bus Routing Problem
The School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP) covers the issue of establishing plans to efficiently transport students distributed across a designated area to the relevant schools using defined resources. As with the similar Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), the SBRP may have diverse constraints such as heterogeneous vehicles, the allotted time window and multiple depots. Many solutions for effectively solving the problem are currently being studied. By their nature, these routing problems are NP-Hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) problems in which the search domains increase exponentially as they become larger, thus making it difficult to obtain solutions using an exact approach except for relatively simple and localized problems. Therefore the heuristic approach is being studied in many regions. In this study, an algorithm was developed using genetic algorithms, which stem from meta-heuristic algorithms, and the algorithm was tested against diverse problems to identify its performance and practicality.
Heuristic solutions to the problem of routing school buses with multiple objectives
Journal of The Operational Research Society, 2002
In this paper, we address the problem of routing school buses in a rural area. We approach this problem with a node routing model with multiple objectives that arise from conflicting viewpoints. From the point of view of cost, it is desirable to minimize the number of buses used to transport students from their homes to school and back. And from the point of view of service, it is desirable to minimize the time that a given student spends in route. The current literature deals primarily with single-objective problems and the models with multiple objectives typically employ a weighted function to combine the objectives into a single one. We develop a solution procedure that considers each objective separately and search for a set of efficient solutions instead of a single optimum. Our solution procedure is based on constructing, improving and then combining solutions within the framework of the evolutionary approach known as scatter search. Experimental testing with real data is used to assess the merit of our proposed procedure.
Proposal of a method for routing school buses in a small-sized county
Acta Scientiarum. Technology
The School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP) is widely discussed in the operations research literature and can be solved by several exact methods and heuristics. This problem seeks to designate the most efficient routes for a fleet of school buses, minimizing the total distance covered and considering variables such as bus stop locations, number of passengers, and the assigned destination for each of them. This study aims at solving a real case SBRP of a small-sized county located in the state of Paraná. The proposed method is based on the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) and Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) combined with a heuristic correction that guarantees sequence constraints, in which the student has to be collected before visiting their destination school. It was possible to obtain two routes of 30.76 km and 17.42 km respectively and both with the total vehicles’ capacity of 24 students, which corresponds to the reduction of about 10% in the daily distance covered by two ...
A School Bus Routing Heuristic Algorithm Allowing Heterogeneous Fleets and Bus Stop Selection
SN Computer Science
This paper addresses a school bus routing problem formulated as a capacitated and time-constrained open vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous fleet and single loads. This problem incorporates several realistic features, such as student eligibility, maximum walking distances, bus stop selection, maximum riding times, different types of buses, multistops, and bus dwell times. A heuristic algorithm based on an iterated local search approach is proposed for this problem. It determines the selection of bus stops from a set of potential stops, the assignment of students to the selected bus stops, and the routes along the selected bus stops. The main objectives are minimizing the number of buses used, the total student walking distance, and the total route journey time. Other aims are balancing route journey times between buses and minimizing the total number of empty seats. A set of 20 real-world problem instances are used to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Results indic...
NOMS 2016 - 2016 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium, 2016
In this work we tackle the bus stop selection step for the School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP). Our goal is to minimize the number of bus stops in order to assign all students to a bus stop respecting a home-to-bus-stop walking distance constraint. Our strategy creates a large number of possible bus stops points in a road network and uses a pseudo-random constructive heuristic algorithm to assign students to a bus stops. Our approach is tested on a real georeferenced data of a brazilian city and is compared with a different methodology. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to find good solutions for this optimization problem. Besides,the higher the number of possible points to install bus stops, the smaller is the number of bus stops required to attend all students.
A mathematical formulation for a school bus routing problem
2006
The school bus routing problem discussed in this paper, is similar to the standard vehicle routing problem, but has several interesting additional features. In the standard VRP all stops to visit are given. In our school bus routing problem, we assume that a set of potential stops is given, as well as a set of students that can walk to one or more of these potential stops. The school buses used to pick up the students and transport them to their schools have a finite capacity. The goal of this routing problem is to select a subset of stops that will actually be visited by the buses, determine which stop each student should walk to and develop a set of tours that minimize the total distance travelled by all buses. We develop an integer programming formulation for this problem, as well as a problem instance generator. We then show how the problem can be solved using a commercial integer programming solver and discuss some of our results on small instances.