Genetic Search for Multi School Routing

Abstract

In genetic search for multi school routing, a set of commonly shared school buses and vans with capacity, travel speed and travel time limitations are used to service students from their pick up locations to their respective schools. The goal is to reduce the number of buses used, the total travel time of the students and the total operating cost of the school buses. This paper focuses on the optimization of the routes using genetic algorithm that is widely applied for combinatorial optimization problems including vehicle routing problems with time windows. The proposed genetic algorithm uses the genetic representation of routes as genes, which is then combined as chromosomes, applies appropriate genetic operators and performs chromosome evaluation. The progress of the solution is also displayed in a GUI window and the results are saved in the database for further analysis. A random set of several test problems were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach and encouraging results were obtained.