Best practice: School bus planning?

[OscarMonell]

Hi!
I need to deliver 300 students to their respective school. I have my geocoded points with the students home location, together with their target-school.
I have one bus depot and perhaps 5-6 buses with 40 seats capacity.
I need to fill up the buses and then deliver the students to their school.
A student can not ride longer than 40 minutes.

But when I try to solve this through VRP Paired orders my bus will pick up 2-3 students, then deliver them to the school and then return for an additional 2-3 students.

What am I missing?
Is there another method I should be using?

[NaAn · Accepted solution]

Hi,

When you want to drop off all students with a single visit to the school, it is suggested to set up the school bus problem in the following way:

1. All of student drop-off orders (the second order in the pair which represents the school visit) must have the exactly the same drop-off time windows.


2. All of the order pairs must have the same maximum transit time (MaxTransitTime) values. In your case, the MaxTransitTime should be set to 40.

Thanks.

Anna

[OscarMonell]

Great!

Looks promising on inital tests with a subset of data!

Will give it a go with my whole student database later today!

But how do I handle the capacity on the bus, since my target
location is counted towards that limit?
Just double the capacity count?

[NaAn]

Hi,

You don't need to double the capacity on routes. The drop-off order (the second order of the pair) has the delivery quantity which will not be counted towards the route capacity limit.

Thanks.

Anna

[DiegoLlamas]

Hi,
I am trying to do a VRP analyst.

I have a Student Layer, the layer where I Have 6 school buses with different capacity and  I have the schools. In the Students layer I have the name and the school where he assist. I have my network. I was reading about this and I found exercise 8 http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Exercise_8_Finding_best_routes_to_serv... where they are doing something similar, taking the bus, go for the student to his house and drop him to the school (in the example is patien, doctor) but in this example they are using a geocode, I have already the point, with no address. is necessary to use a locator if I want to use a VRP analyst? When I do a closet location analysis just need the reference point of the facility. if I don't have the adress for the students and the schools, can I do the VRP? do I need the geocode?

Hope you can help.

Diego Llamas

[JaySandhu]

If your data is already in a point feature class then you can directly load them into any route solver such as VRP. In the NA window, you can right-click the Load Locations option and select the point feature class to load from. If you run through the other tutorials then you can see how this is done.

Jay Sandhu

[sultanHarbi]

Hi

I need to collect 400 students from their homes to the school. I have my school location and the students homes location. I have 15 buses with 28 seats capacity.
I need to collect the students to their school and return them to their homes.
I need to prepare my street data to use to create Network dataset. What is type of fields that need to include in street feature class?

Best Regards
Sultan

[NaAn]

Hi,

I would suggest you to go through tutorial exercise 1,
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/#/Exercise_1_Creating_a_network_dataset/00470000005t00...
download the tutorial data and use SanDiego.gdb or SanFrancisco.gdb as examples.
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=d6bd91b2fddc483b8ccbc66942db84cb

The source data must have time and distance fields on street feature class so you can use VRP solver.

Please feel free to let me know if you need more help.

Thanks.

Anna

[DiegoLlamas]

Hi,

I would suggest you to go through tutorial exercise 1,
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/#/Exercise_1_Creating_a_network_dataset/00470000005t00...
download the tutorial data and use SanDiego.gdb or SanFrancisco.gdb as examples.
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=d6bd91b2fddc483b8ccbc66942db84cb

The source data must have time and distance fields on street feature class so you can use VRP solver.

Please feel free to let me know if you need more help.

Thanks.

Anna

Hi,

thanks for all your help..

I have one last question, Anybody knows the logic or the algorithm that VRP use to create the better route? I would appreciate your help

the best Regards,

Diego Llamas