A strategy for clustering students minimizing the number of bus stops for solving the school bus routing problem

Abstract

In this work we tackle the bus stop selection step for the School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP). Our goal is to minimize the number of bus stops in order to assign all students to a bus stop respecting a home-to-bus-stop walking distance constraint. Our strategy creates a large number of possible bus stops points in a road network and uses a pseudo-random constructive heuristic algorithm to assign students to a bus stops. Our approach is tested on a real georeferenced data of a Brazilian city and is compared with a different methodology. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to find good solutions for this optimization problem. Besides, the higher the number of possible points to install bus stops, the smaller is the number of bus stops required to attend all students.