A multicriteria approach for optimizing bus schedules and school starting times

In many rural counties pupils on their way to school are a large, if not the largest group of customers for public mass transit. Hence an effective optimization of public mass transit in these regions must include the traffic caused by pupils. Besides a change in the schedules of the buses and the starting times of the trips, the school starting time may become an integral part of the planning process. We discuss the legal framework for this optimization problem in German states and counties and present a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming formulation for the simultaneous specification of school and trip starting times. For its solution, we develop a two-stage decomposition heuristic and apply it to practical data sets from three different rural German counties.