A real-world Employee Bus Routing Problem application with mixed loads

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a real-world application of the Employee Shuttle Bus Routing (ESBR) for a transportation company that provides shuttle services for an industrial group. We present a mathematical model that enables the company with mixed loads allowance and dis-allowance options, since the appearance of Covid-19 has banned the transportation of employees belonging to different workplaces on the same bus. We solved this model using the CPLEX solver and tested it on real-world data instances. However, the data set was large which made the exact solutions hard to obtain. Therefore, we sought to divide the data set into clusters using the Agglomerative Clustering algorithm and we ran the model on these groups independently. At the end of this paper, we present a comparison, in terms of execution time and objective value, of the model’s results for mixed loads respectively allowed and forbidden.