The school bus routing problem with student choice: a bilevel approach and a simple and effective metaheuristic

The school bus routing problem (SBRP) involves interrelated decisions such as selecting the stops, allocating students to selected and designing routes for transporting taking into account capacity constraint, with objective of minimizing cost routes. This paper addresses SBRP when reaction selection stops is taken account, that is, are allowed choose stop best suits them. A bilevel optimization model multiple followers formulated, its transformation a single-level mixed integer linear programming (MILP) proposed. simple effective metaheuristic algorithm also developed solve problem. solving four MILP problems at beginning, which can be used obtain tight upper bounds optimal solution. Extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances from literature show effectiveness proposed in terms both quality solution found required computing time.