Assigning buses to schedules in a metropolitan area

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Abstract

The problem of scheduling a fleet of buses to a given set of trips is encountered by large bus companies performing thousands of trips per day. The time-tables for those trips are planned separately and reflect the passengers demand for transportation. These time-tables are inputs for the bus scheduling procedures. The scheduling problem is difficult due to its size and due to many operational constraints which are imposed. A mathematical formulation of the problem is presented and an efficient algorithm is developed. This paper presents results and computational experience that were obtained from implementing the model in a large bus company.

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    Bezalel Gavish in an Assistant Professor and area coordinator of Computers and Information Systems at the Graduate School of Management, University of Rochester. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He had previously been a staff member of IBM Israel Scientific Center, and was involved in the application of computers and operations research techniques in Logistics, Medical Diagnosis, Transportation, Marketing and Modelling of Computer Systems.

    Paul Schweitzer is Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Management, University of Rochester, on leave from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York where he worked in the areas of telecommunications design, computer networks, and queueing theory. He has also done significant work in the areas of Markovian decision theory and military operations research.

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