Solving School Bus Routing Problem by Intelligent Water Drops Algorithm

The School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP) is an essential subject in the development of transportation. Solving the problem will have a great impact on the transportation systems by improving the quality of the provided service and reducing the operations costs. SBRP tries to find an efficient school buses plan where each bus takes up students from different bus stops and transports them to their schools while fulfilling number constraints including the maximum bus capacity and the time window of a school. This study used Intelligent Water Drops (IWD) optimization approach to resolve (SBRP). IWD is a meta-heuristic swarm-based optimization technique that simulates natural water drops. The scheme of the IWD algorithm is applied here to find a reasonable solution to SBRP. The application of IWD algorithm produces satisfying results within a reasonable amount of time.