Routing and scheduling

Local councils in the UK spend about £1b each year on transporting children to school. Where the children have special needs and wheelchairs and escorts are needed, the associated routing and scheduling is very complex. Existing commercial software could not adequately solve the problem.

Local governments are under pressure to reduce these costs while maintaining a high level of service.

Researchers in Mathematical Sciences were challenged with developing solution approaches that could help local authorities in their school transportation operations.

Context

In most local authorities school bus scheduling has been performed manually with the aim of finding a satisfactory solution that meets all the relevant constraints and children’s special needs. Historically this hasn’t exploited the best optimisation techniques and can end up incurring significant costs, excessive vehicle use, and meaning many children with complex needs are excluded from travelling to school on buses with their friends.

Our solution

Professor Chris Potts, from Mathematical Sciences at Southampton, and Professor Julia Bennell , from Management, worked with a specialist software company Logical Transport to develop a software solution for school transportation.

They were challenged with extending the methodologies currently used in routing and scheduling to accommodate a range of complex constraints such as transporting wheelchairs or including school escorts.

The pair used their vast experience gained over 20 years from developing effective local search methods for a variety of different problems. This proved invaluable in tackling the key problems of routing and scheduling the vehicles.

The software tools they produced have significant competitive advantages for school bus scheduling as they can deal with the differing needs of passengers and flexible capacity vehicles, and users can prioritise the number of vehicles, mileage, vehicle time on the road or passenger time in vehicle.

What was the impact?

The new software has led to significant reductions in home to school transport costs, less time required to take children to school, as well as a reduction in fuel emissions from better and shorter routing.

Also children with complex or unique needs, who were previously excluded from school buses and had to travel on their own, can now be accommodated on the buses, improving their social skills and rehabilitation.

Since introducing the software, local councils have reported that the number of vehicles they use has typically been reduced by between 10 and 25 per cent, with the miles driven reduced by 12 to 15 per cent.

St Augustine’s Catholic College, in Trowbridge, showed a 19 per cent reduction in vehicles and a 19 per cent reduction in miles driven, with an estimated saving of £100,000 a year.

The Logical Transport software company has also reported increased revenues of more than 300 per cent over the past two years, and cites its relationship with the University of Southampton as a significant contributor to this success.