A metaheuristic for the school bus routing problem with bus stop selection

Existing literature on routing of school buses has focused mainly on building intricate models that attempt to capture as many real-life constraints and objectives as possible. In contrast, the focus of this paper is on understanding the joint problem of bus route generation and bus stop selection – two important sub-problems – in its most basic form. To this end, this paper defines the school bus routing problem (SBRP) as a variant of the vehicle routing problem in which three simultaneous decisions have to be made: (1) determine the set of stops to visit, (2) determine for each student which stop (s)he should walk to, and (3) determine routes that lie along the chosen stops, so that the total traveled distance is minimized. An MIP model of this basic problem is developed.