PASS: enhancing school stop selection and trip generation by adding Partial-load Assignment and using Single-Stop vehicles

School districts try to address their transportation needs by solving a series of optimization problems including bus stop selection, bus trip generation, school bell time adjustment, and route scheduling. While the problems are similar for different areas, the solution approach and modelling should be different due to the different characteristics of urban and rural areas. It is costly and time-consuming for a conventional school bus to pick up students who live in rural areas with large distances between them. One solution to this difficulty is single-stop vehicles. Single-stop vehicles are assumed to have small capacity, cheaper cost, and only visit one bus stop for picking up students. Two possible vehicle types are passenger cars of the students' parents who are willing to pick up other students on their way to school/work under a financial incentive and Uber/Lyft outsourcing. The bus stop selection and trip generation problem are modeled as a Partial-load and Assignment using Single-Stop vehicle (PASS) problem. The proposed mixed-integer programming model simultaneously optimizes for the number of conventional buses and single-stop vehicles; bus stop selection and student reassignment; route for each conventional bus and single-stop vehicle; and the number of the students to pick up at each stop for each conventional bus. The computational experiments based on randomly generated test problems show that the two vehicle-type fleet can save up to 30% compared to a conventional, homogeneous fleet. A real-world problem from Aurora Joint School District in Colorado showed significant improvement using the PASS approach.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References;
  • Pagination: 5p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01719612
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 19-03026
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Oct 21 2019 10:08AM