A multi-objective capacitated rural school bus routing problem with heterogeneous fleet and mixed loads

Four multi-objective meta-heuristic algorithms are presented to solve a multi-objective capacitated rural school bus routing problem with a heterogeneous fleet and mixed loads. Three objectives are considered: the total weighted traveling time of the students, the balance of routes among drivers, and the routing costs. The proposed methods were compared with one from the literature, and their performance assessed observing three multi-objective metrics: cardinality, coverage, and hyper-volume. All four devised methods outperformed the one from the literature. The algorithm with a path relinking procedure embedded during the crowding distance selection scheme had the best overall performance.