Comparative analysis of application of heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms to the school bus routing problem

This paper considers the school bus routing problem, which is to ensure delivery of students after lessons from school to their stops. The objective function is to minimize the maximum length of the routes. A short review of the literature on this theme is provided. The problem definition and formalization is given. The heuristic algorithm proposed by the authors earlier is described. A two-step algorithm based on ant colony metaheuristics is described. The algorithm consists of initial clustering of stops at which students drop off, and subsequent ant colony optimization with different parameters, which is applied to each cluster. The results of comparing the efficiency of the proposed algorithms and the performance of the program for two algorithms are presented.