GIS based heuristic solution of the vehicle routing problem to optimize the school bus routing and scheduling

The School bus routing and scheduling can be treated as a multi-objective Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that helps to transport the students in the safest, most economical and convenient way. The objective of this paper is to optimize the overall transportation cost by minimizing the fleet of vehicles and time spent in the journey. In this research, a Geographical Information System (GIS) based solution for School Bus Routing and Scheduling (SBRS) with time window is proposed using Clarke & Wright's algorithm. The result of this research helps the Transport Management to design a dynamic shortest and fastest route for the vehicles. The GIS helps to identify the real-world pickup stops according to the concentration of the students in a particular area as well as to visualize the current optimum route and pickup points. The proposed methodology is applied and tested to the Scholastica School in Dhaka city of Bangladesh with geo referenced data of school and pickup stops. A better result is obtained by the proposed method comparing to the existing semi-manual system.