An Efficient Heuristic for Passenger Bus VRP with Preferences and Tradeoffs.

One category of vehicle routing problems (VRP) involving groups of people are School Bus Routing Problems (SBRP). In this paper, we investigate a form of SBRP where passengers can be dropped off at a number of possible locations. If the location is not the home address, they continue on foot. Different drop-off choices allow for different set of passengers to be dropped off together which affects the total vehicle driving distance. There is an inevitable trade-off between two goals, reducing driving versus walking distance. Unlike typical SBRP, the set of passengers are not known well in advance and there is little time to compute a solution, hence, efficiency is more important than optimality. In this short paper, we propose a model with an efficient incremental algorithm for such problems. We demonstrate the efficacy with experiments on real-world datasets with quick solving while balancing trade-offs.