A GRASP Metaheuristic Approach to the School Bus Routing Problem that Minimize the Transportation Cost

The School Bus Routing Problem is a widely studied combinatorial optimization problem and for which a state of the art has not been clearly defined. This study aimed to develop a computational method of routing school buses with good performance in search of success in minimizing the total cost with school transport as well such as, to analyze the performance of the solution in comparison to the reference algorithms of the literature. In order to do so, a GRASP metaheuristic was used. From the data analysis, it was possible to perceive that the algorithm points out a better performance in the routing phase than in the scheduling phase, that is, it minimizes the number of trips and the total cost of school transport but does not have good results in relation to the number of routes or buses. Throughout the paper, it is possible to confirm the satisfactory performance of the GRASP regarding the production of savings in the total value of school bus routing.