A multi-objective optimization model for student assignments in a school bus routing problem

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the student assignments in a school bus routing problem involving a bus stop selection and the satisfaction score of each student for all bus stops. The optimization model for the focused problem is created in two cases in term of a single-objective optimization and a multi-objective optimization. In case of a multi-objective optimization, the epsilon-constraint method and the weighted-sum method are used for solving this problem. In both cases, two types of our models are investigated. The first type of our model is related to the student assignment in a school bus routing problem without bus stop selection while the second type of our model is related to the same problem with bus stop selection. Two types of our models in both cases are tested with the simulated data. In case of a single-objective optimization, our experiment reports that the second model is suitable to solve the problem whenever the total distance of all buses is interested. In the meantime, both models can be selected if the total of satisfaction score is more important than the total distance of all buses. For the multi-objective optimization, the experiment shows that the total distance of the second model is shorter than the first model while the total of satisfaction scores of both models are slightly different.