Abstract

Transportation systems play a critical role in supporting economic activity, workforce mobility, and service delivery in urban and industrial environments. In many organizations, fixed-time transportation systems are essential for ensuring that employees are transferred from accommodation facilities to work locations within strict operational time windows. The case study company in this research operates a large-scale labour transport service between multiple accommodation camps and client sites in Dubai. Historically, buses were dispatched in an ad hoc manner, relying on supervisors’ experience rather than a systematic planning approach. This often led to low seat utilisation, unnecessarily long routes, higher fuel costs, and avoidable CO₂ emissions. The objective of this study is to develop and evaluate an optimization and simulation framework that assigns and routes a heterogeneous bus fleet more efficiently, while satisfying all worker demand within operational time windows. The methodology combines three main components. First, operational data were cleaned and aggregated into morning demand groups by camp and time window in Excel. An assigning framework was done through Excel Solver, discrete-event model in Arena, OptQuest on top of the Arena model to assign buses of different capacities to each demand group and to understand which approach allows for the best utilization of the available buses. Finally, a routing and distance-calculation tool was built in Excel using the haversine formula together with a custom VBA macro implementing a nearest-neighbour heuristic. The results show that several bus combinations can satisfy the required demand, but the Solver-based configuration, combined with the macro-driven routing model, delivers the best overall performance. Compared with TransCo’s informal dispatching practice, the final solution significantly reduces total operating cost (25%) and achieves a substantial decrease in CO₂ emissions (81%), while still serving all workers within the available shift time.

Publication Date

12-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Engineering Management (ME)

Department, Program, or Center

Mechanical Engineering

Advisor

Dua Weraikat

Advisor/Committee Member

Sharfuddin Ahmed Khan

Advisor/Committee Member

Umer Javed

Comments

This thesis has been embargoed. The full-text will be available on or around 1/22/2027.

Campus

RIT Dubai

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