A new and much faster algorithm is presented for the problem of assigning buses to a large number of short trips in an urban area. The trips are grouped into chains, beginning and ending at the same bus depot, and a vehicle is assigned to each one of them. Fleet size costs and dead heading time are to be minimized. This problem has been already formulated as a transportation problem and more recently, as an assignment model. However, some difficulties, such as the zero pivot phenomenon, rising in many practical cases drastically affected computing times required to obtain the optimal solution. This is overcome by an algorithm based on the hungarian method and making full use of the sparsity of the assignment matrix for the bus scheduling problem. Computational results comparing the different methods are given in the last section of the paper. Significant reductions in computing time are obtained for either real case applications or random generated test problems.
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Paixão et al. (1987) studied this question.