Optimization of School Bus Routes for Crystal Lake South High School Utilizing ARCLogistics

Abstract

The ability to efficiently and safely transport their students to and from school on a daily basis is an important part of every school district’s responsibilities. Like any organization, school districts want to cut down on the cost of transportation. With technological advances, this task is becoming more of a science every year. The School Bus Routing problem continues to be difficult one to solve. ARCLogistcs, a routing software from ESRI, was tested in against District 155 Crystal Lake South High School’s current routes by entering the current routes into the ARCLogistics interface and comparing them to a set of routes generated by ARCLogistics itself. Despite the high reputation of ESRI in the Geographic Information Systems world, the routes generated by ARCLogistics were less cost effective, taking a combined total of 42 minutes longer than the current ten routes, over four extra minutes per bus route. These results, combined with several design failures, in terms of bus routing, in the ARCLogistics software, make it difficult to use ARCLogistics for School Bus Routing purposes.