School Bus Routing and Scheduling: a Real Case Study

This paper presents a model to schedule school buses transportation routes. Student’s daily routes defined between student’s homes, schools and extra curricula activities are analysed while accounting for three different objectives: number of vehicles, route total time and average passenger travelling time. A combined multiobjective function is defined. As solution method to this problem, a heuristic algorithm was developed. This combines a set of heuristic procedures with a simulated annealing algorithm. The developed algorithm applicability and efficiency is studied on the solution of a real case-study of a students transportation company that operates in the city of Lisbon in Portugal. As results, it was found an improvement on the economics and service level up to 3% and 28%, respectively, when compared to the real current routes.