School Bus Stop Selection and Routing with Walking Accessibility

As a safe and convenient transportation service, the school bus currently plays an important role in students’ commute in China. A variant called school bus stop selection and routing problem with walking accessibility (SBSSRPWA) that considers the individual differences among students is introduced in this paper. A mixed integer programming model is proposed for SBSSRPWA aiming at minimizing the total traveling time from home to school of all students. A two-stage solution method is proposed incorporating a hybrid density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and k-means clustering stop selection method that considers various walking accessibilities as stop coverages in stage 1. An improved ant colony optimization routing algorithm based on problem characteristics is introduced in stage 2. The proposed solution method is conducted on a randomly generated instance.