Cooperative School Bus Routing Problem

School bus has the great significance in ensuring the safety of students and teaching arrangements as one aspect of the educational service. Reasonable school bus system is an important measure to solve the problem of the traffic congestion around schools during peak hours and make sure of the safety of students. The optimization of school bus routing problem is an important part of school bus transport system. Rational optimization of the school bus routing operation can reduce the operating costs of school bus service, besides it also can improve the service quality, which will lead to the enhancement of the attractiveness of the school bus service.This paper analysed the single-center school bus routing problem based on the analysis of relevant literatures. A conception of joint operation between different schools is proposed in consideration of the situation of the school bus operation, then a new model towards multi-center school bus routing problem is constructed. This paper introduced virtual nodes to make the new model easy to solve by transform it to the single-center school bus routing problem. In this paper, a kind of developed ant colony algorithm is proposed to solve the model to make sure of the applicability among a large network. Finally, two actual schools were selected as instances and the models presented in this paper were adopted. The results showed that the model proposed in this paper can notably reduce the cost of the school bus operation system and improve the quality of school bus service. The new model proposed in this paper was verified to be an effective model to solve this kind of problem.In this paper, the new model of multi-center school bus routing problem were verified to be useful in the actual case. The study in this paper can make a contribution to development of the theory on school bus operation system and the recommendation to the school bus operation in practice.