Heuristic Methods Applied to the Optimization School Bus Transportation Routes: A Real Case.

The problem discussed in this paper is similar to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), however new contributions are proposed. In this work a heuristic algorithm is proposed to determine the set of the Bus Stops. A new approach is proposed to construct digital maps containing the roads where the vehicles will be able to travel, since there are no digital maps of these regions. The real distances between the points are calculated and the heuristics Location Based Heuristic with some additional features was used to propose the new routes. The algorithm was named by Adapted Location Based Heuristic (ALBH). The School Transportation Problem was implemented in the State of Parana for 399 cities. We present here the results obtained for 10 of the 399 cities. The results obtained by using this approach showed improvement in daily distance performed and in the amount of the vehicles used to do the job. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]