Model and Algorithm for Solving School Bus Problem

School bus routing problem has been a significant concern of most people related to school and school bus system as one of vehicle routing problems. Making an appropriate problem formulation depends on how to reflect the realities of the problem. And, as the problem scope becomes wider, the problem can’t be solved only with the exact methods. So, there is need to develop an efficient heuristic method to solve more complicated problem. In this study, the model for school bus routing problem is proposed, and a heuristic algorithm for solving the proposed model is suggested. The model is formulated as a mixed-integer programming problem. To validate the model, several random small network problems are solved by using the commercial optimization package CPLEX. Also, a heurist algorithm based on harmony search is proposed to solve this problem. The results of the heuristic are compared with the results obtained from exact solution by CPLEX to validate and evaluate the heuristic algorithm. Computation results show that the solution by the heuristic was exactly the same as that of exact method using CPLEX. But, the heuristic produces the same results in a very short time.