Cooperation strategies featuring optimization in the school transportation system in Bogota

Abstract

The transport of students presents important challenges in the case of the city of Bogota, where an important cluster of schools is located in one zone, but there is only one road connecting these schools to residential zones. Thus, traffic congestion is high, generating long travel times for students, high operational costs, and mobility problems. This paper studies the impacts of a cooperative strategy between logistics operators using a mixed integer programming mathematical model, to find the optimal design of school routes on a network with the topology that describes the aforementioned road system. Two strategies are compared: a mixed loads strategy, where students from different schools share buses; and a single load strategy, where students from different schools cannot share buses. The objective is to minimize the total operational costs while satisfying the schools’ time windows. Comparative results of the two models using exact and heuristic approaches are presented.