Journal of Operational Research and Its Applications ( Applied Mathematics ) - Lahijan Azad University

Current studies regarding to school bus routing problem basically are about travel time and cost of travel minimization. In this paper we pay more attention to the challenges of Transportation Company in getting students to their school in a way that maximize the company profit as well as minimize the cost of students assignment. In this study for the first time the transportation company is allowed to pay a fine to students in order to not serving them. In the investigated school bus routing problem, the following will be considered simultaneously: 

1. Enabling potential stations(location)
2. Determining which students to be assigned to which stations and which students to be paid by company for not being served(allocation)
3. Determining routs among stations so that the total traveled distance be minimized(routing)

A single objective mix integer programming of this problem is developed. Finally, an exact approach and a metaheuristic procedure is proposed for solving the problem. The results of this two approaches are studied in 5 generated samples and the results indicate good performance of metaheuristic procedure.