Development of a Genetic Algorithm for the School Bus Routing Problem

The School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP) covers the issue of establishing plans to efficiently transport students distributed across a designated area to the relevant schools using defined resources. As with the similar Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), the SBRP may have diverse constraints such as heterogeneous vehicles, the allotted time window and multiple depots. Many solutions for effectively solving the problem are currently being studied. By their nature, these routing problems are NP-Hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) problems in which the search domains increase exponentially as they become larger, thus making it difficult to obtain solutions using an exact approach except for relatively simple and localized problems. Therefore the heuristic approach is being studied in many regions. In this study, an algorithm was developed using genetic algorithms, which stem from meta-heuristic algorithms, and the algorithm was tested against diverse problems to identify its performance and practicality.