Solving the service-oriented single-route school bus routing problem: Exact and heuristic solutions

Abstract

This paper addresses a school bus routing problem, which is classified as a location–allocation–routing problem. The problem consists of selecting pickup locations, allocating students to them, and generating a route that traverses between them. The proposed model is for a single school and a single-route. The objective is to find the subset of pickup stops aiming to minimize the total distance walked by all students from their homes to the respective pickup stops, subject to an upper bound on the route distance of connecting selected stops. We present an exact and heuristic algorithms which are developed based on a layered graph. Computational results are conducted on a series of generated benchmark instances and test data from Norway that demonstrate a good performance of the proposed approach.