Design and Deployment of an Innovative School Bus Service in Lisbon

Abstract This paper presents the design and deployment of an innovative and high standard school bus service developed for Lisbon. The design of the new service introduces an integrated procedure based on traditional formulations of the School bus routing problem, a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). The adopted solution divided the problem in two steps: a first step that identify the most suitable concentration points of students, and a second step that computes the optimal routes serving those stops. The paper discusses the definition of the system standards, the optimisation results, as well as some issues raised during its deployment.