An Analysis of Special Needs Student Busing

Abstract

Population growth can lead to public school capacity issues as well as increased school bus utilization, which, in turn, can result in longer school bus transport times for regular and special needs students. Special needs or medically fragile students are children with special health care needs who are at increased health and safety risk. It is common practice to provide special needs students with specially-equipped buses and/or special classroom environments with specific facilities or services. However, the assignment of student services to schools is regularly made without regard to bus transportation considerations for special needs students. Considering the potentially negative impact of long school bus rides on these students, we present the first sys tematic, integrated analyses of special needs student busing and classroom assign ments. We provide models and algorithms for maintaining administration-based transportation financial performance measures while simultaneously designing smarter transportation networks considering both student geographical location and service needs.

Employee Shuttle Bus Routing Problem

“…In the literature, SBRP has been categorized under different sub-groups depending on the considered problem: bus stop selection, bus route generation, and bus route scheduling, etc. Among these problems, bus stop selection problem [5,6,7] identifies a bus stop location for each student, bus route generation problem [8,9,10,11,12] determines the visiting sequences of predetermined bus stops, and bus route scheduling problem [13,14] includes a time dimension to determine exact loading time of the students. The main focus of this work will be on the route generation part since the company has already fixed the possible pickup locations (bus stops), and the time of loading at each stop is not their primary focus, which is post adjustable.…”

Balanced Scheduling of School Bus Trips using a Perfect Matching Heuristic

“…The SBSP might then be approached through different practical objectives; one might be solely interested in maximizing profit (minimizing costs), while others take measures of the equity of service (fairness) and level of service into account. The most common objective functions are the minimization of total travel distance or time, the total number of trips, and the total cost that is the combination of the aggregate travel distance and number of trips (10)(11)(12)(13)(14). Setting aside the fixed costs for each trip, the bus operational/variable cost is directly related to the total travel distance.…”

Solving the School Bus Routing Problem by Maximizing Trip Compatibility

“…The most common objectives of SBRP are minimizing total travel distance or time (8,9,(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22), minimizing total trips (6,7,23,24), and minimizing total cost, including bus purchase (fixed) cost and bus operation cost (3,13,14,(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30). The total cost is a combination of the first two objectives because bus purchase cost is proportional to the number of trips (without scheduling, each trip is assumed to be served by one bus), and bus operation cost is equivalent to the total travel distance.…”