School Bus Routing and Scheduling Problem

We consider th e school bus rout ing and scheduling problem,where transportation demand is known and bus scheduling can be planned in advance.We first propose a modeling framework which aims to optimize a level of service for a given number of buses. Then,we describe a procedure building first a feasible solution, and subsequently improving it,using a heuristic. After the performance analysis of three types of heuristics on real and synthetic data,we recommend the use of simulated annealing exploring infeasible solutions,which performs slightly better than all others. More importantly, we find that the performance of all heuristics is not globally affected by the choice of the parameters.This is important from a practitioner viewpoint,as the fine tuning of algorithm parameters is not critical for its performance.