School bus routing using genetic algorithms

The school bus routing problem involves transporting students from predefined locations to the school using a fleet of school buses with varying capacity. The objective is to minimize the fleet size in addition to minimizing the distance traveled by the buses and the travel time of the students. As the school bus routing problem belongs to the NP-complete class of problems, search strategies based on heuristic methods are most promising for problems in this class. GENROUTER is a system that uses genetic algorithms, an adaptive heuristic search strategy, for routing school buses. The GENROUTER system was used to route school buses for two school districts. The routes obtained by GENROUTER system were superior to those obtained by the CHOOSE school bus routing system and the current routes in use by the two school districts.