Integrated student to school assignment and school bus routing problem for special needs students

Azadeh Ansari, Leily Farrokhvar and Behrooz Kamali

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2021, vol. 152, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we address the combined problem of assigning students to schools and generating school bus routes for special needs students. Special needs students typically require additional accommodations, both in terms of the services available at school and during pick-ups and drop-offs. This introduces additional complexities to the problems of assignment and routing for students. We develop a mathematical model that jointly addresses these problems, and incorporate multi-loads and heterogeneous bus fleet features. The model simultaneously assigns special needs students to schools based on their level of need and the availability of resources, and generates efficient routes to transport them to their designated schools. We propose a two-phase heuristic approach using the capacitated clustering problem, which is capable of generating high-quality solutions. We evaluate our proposed methodology using several randomly generated instances, and a real-world case study in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The results from the case study demonstrate that the proposed methodology can reduce the total miles traveled by buses by over 35% on average, when compared to previously developed heuristics in the literature for the same case study.

Keywords: Transportation; Heuristics; School bus routing; Capacitated clustering problem; Special needs students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554521001836
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transe:v:152:y:2021:i:c:s1366554521001836

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600244/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600244/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102416

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review is currently edited by W. Talley

More articles in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().