A post-improvement procedure for the mixed load school bus routing problem

► A new mixed load school bus routing algorithm is proposed. ► Benchmark problems are proposed. ► The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated. ► It has been successfully applied to real-world problems. This paper aims to develop a mixed load algorithm for the school bus routing problem (SBRP) and measure its effects on the number of required vehicles. SBRP seeks to find optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles, where each vehicle transports students from their homes and to their schools while satisfying various constraints. When mixed load is allowed, students of different schools can get on the same bus at the same time. Although many of real world SBRP allow mixed load, only a few studies have considered these cases. In this paper, we present a new mixed load improvement algorithm and compare it with the only existing algorithm from the literature. Benchmark problems are proposed to compare the performances of algorithms and to stimulate other researchers’ further study. The proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithm on the benchmark problem instances. It has also been successfully applied to some of real-world SBRP and could reduce the required number of vehicles compared with the current practice.