Abstract

The city of Dubai has more than 200 schools, with around 6,500 School buses that are either managed by the school itself or bus operator companies. A low percentage of bus-usage aggravates school traffic according to top RTA official that stated that only 11% of total school trips in Dubai are via bus (compared to 32% in the United States), school buses account for 13% of peak-hour traffic while they 53% of bus seats were occupied, as parents prefer private transport. Private transport schools remain as significant contributing factor traffic congestion, and environmental pollution as a major percentage of students are using their transportation due to reasons like cost and travel time on the bus. Bus routes that are improperly planned or buses that are over-utilized forcing buses to run for longer distances to collect few students do not help the traffic status in the city. Parents/drivers that are dropping children who are not utilizing the school bus are also contributing largely to the stats of the traffic. This city traffic impacts the city economy, including business and tourism, the city Leadership position, sustainability and Happiness, resources efficiency and environment, and including impact on children’s, the future workforce, health & academic performance. Many cities seek optimizing school bus network to accommodate every student in dynamic configuration (route and passenger) managed by a control center. This capstone project selects few schools, study the subset of students who use the bus, calculate what distances they would have travelled if used their own transport, then optimize their route as they use the school bus. Finally, the capstone also concludes by optimization of bus users across a sample of two different schools In this study, optimized routes for school buses were created each on their own, and then the methodology was repeated for them combined, allowing sharing buses between them. Such a study was not easily achievable in the past when some visualization tools (such as GPS, Google Maps, Data analytics) were not available. Clustering and Salesman Travel problems were utilized in this study. While this case is similar to other vehicle routing problems, such as shipment delivery, garbage containers collection, and other logistics optimization problem, it is much more difficult due to the time-sensitivity and nature of the subject of transport being the youngsters. In addition to saving cost to school bus operators and reduce student’s travel time on the school bus, further work in the future would also demonstrate how new phases of this project would allow for regulations (e.g. max student travel time on bus) enabled by analytics.

Publication Date

5-12-2020

Document Type

Master's Project

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Professional Studies (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Graduate Programs & Research

Advisor

Ioannis Karamitsos

Campus

RIT Dubai

Download

Share

COinS