A novel approach to school bus routing problem

Modeling and solving vehicle routing problems is nowadays emerging as a need in various fields. Among these, it is seen that one of the types that have a wide area and which is looking for the most suitable solution in a short time period is the school bus clustering, routing and scheduling problem. School bus routing problem is defined as the problem that students reside in certain regions can be assigned to the school buses in the most appropriate way and that they can serve different schools in the shortest time with the most appropriate route within the school buses itself. It is not possible to model and solve it directly by classical methods because of many objectives and constraints it contains. In the literature, it is seen that there are many studies in which the problem is addressed in whole or in part. Both exact and variety of developed heuristic algorithms have sought out to provide optimal solutions. In this study, the solution of the problem of clustering and routing for a school bus company serving many schools with different number of students is presented. A hybrid model is used with different clustering techniques and routing methods in order to reduce the costs and increase the profit as much as possible by optimizing the bus routes and number of buses in the student transportation service company. The results are compared with the solutions of saving algorithm for the example in this study, which is expressed as the capacity constrained and open vehicle routing problem.