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IMPROVING FORCED TRANSFER AND SPECIAL NEEDS BUSING IN RURAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS | ||||
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Scott J. Mason, Ph.D. Edward A. Pohl, Ph.D.
July 1, 2008 - June 30, 2009
The goal of this project is to assist rural school systems in developing effective strategies for
dealing with transportation-related school overcrowding issues and special needs busing. Specifically,
we will develop a spreadsheet-based tool that enables school system transportation personnel to explore
options for moving students from an overcrowded school to one with available capacity. The objective is
to minimize loss of classroom time due to movement from the overcrowded school to the appropriate school
with capacity while minimizing the cost associated with the resources required to move students within
the system. In addition, we propose to investigate increasing the efficiency of special needs student
buses through investigating alternate transportation network design strategies such that the point-to-point
busing of these students may potentially be improved via smarter vehicle routing. Our methodology will
include mathematical and heuristic optimization solution approaches as we are focused on developing
practical solution methodologies that can scale appropriately to address the practical-sized busing
problems of interest.
TRB Keywords: Transportation operations, bus routes, heuristic methods.
Product: In Progress (MBTC-3011)
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