Collaborative Versus Non-collaborative Bus School Routing

Vehicle congestion in Bogota is high, generating high operating costs and long waiting times for school buses for children. Currently, in Bogota, and in most of Colombian cities, each school owns its own transportation fleet or outsources buses for the exclusive transportation service for its own students. Student pick-up in the morning and drop-off in the afternoons can be each one modeled as the well-known bus routing problem, which is a special case of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) with a single depot (the school). This approach of the problem can generate inefficiencies when analyzing schools located nearby within the same area. Therefore, this paper compares the results obtained by applying traditional routing models, where each school picks up its students, with a collaborative transportation scheme, in which students from different schools are assigned to a shared bus fleet. This last approach allows schools in the same area picking up students regardless of the school they belong to. Mathematical models are proposed and solved using a commercial solver. As a result, due to the number of pick-up points for each configuration, the solver was not able to reach the global optimum for any of both “traditional” and “collaborative” routes. Despite this, the collaborative transportation model showed advantages in terms of the total distance traveled by the bus fleet, which decreases by 4.37%. The paper opens opportunities for further exploring the collaboration bus routing problem.