School bus routing and scheduling using GIS

Abstract: School bus routing and scheduling are among the major problems because school bus transportation needs to be safe, reliable and efficient. Hence, the research question for this thesis is to answer how to transport students in the safest, most economical and convenient manner. The objective of this thesis is to create a GIS based school transport management system which helps in bus-stop allocation, design fastest and safest bus routes with AVL facility. This thesis also aims to investigate how a school transportation management system may improve the transportation security. The result from this study has helped to develop a school bus routing and scheduling prototype model for Sujatha High School, Hyderabad. This prototype model will help the school transportation management to design shortest and fastest school bus routes and they can also allocate bus stops, which will help them in selecting the pick-up stops for the students and staff, according to their concentration in the areas. This thesis has also, through literature study, investigated how a school transport management system can improve the transportation security. For the time being, there is a general belief that ICT contributes to improving the security, although a quantification of such improvements are lacking. The user interface application has been developed by using VBA and ArcGIS 9.1 Network Analyst provided by Environmental Science Research Institute and it has been evaluated by GIS users.