A multi-objective optimization approach to urban school bus routing: Formulation and solution method

This article introduces a multi-objective approach to modeling the urban school bus routing problem and describes an algorithm for generating a solution to this problem. Because school bus transportation services are provided through the public sector, the service must be evaluated by both efficiency and equity measures. The proposed technique first groups students into clusters using a multi-objective districting algorithm and then generates a school bus route and the bus stops for each cluster using a combination of a set covering algorithm and a traveling salesman problem algorithm. Numerical results are reported using test data from Wellington County, Ontario.