Special need students school bus routing: Consideration for mixed load and heterogeneous fleet

We consider the School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP) for routing special education students based on our experience at a large suburban school district in Western New York, United States. We found the problem to be significantly different from that of routing regular students. The principle differences include the need to pick up special education student from their home, the need to configure buses appropriately for special education students, and the need to provide a higher level of service. Building upon prior work we developed a greedy heuristic coupled with a column generation approach to obtain approximate solutions for benchmark instances. Our findings demonstrated a 10∼20% cost reduction, which is particularly significant since special education transportation account for 40% of the transportation budget.