UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies

During the 2018–19 school year, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) provided bus service to more than 37,000 students. Currently, LAUSD’s routing team designs routes manually. The team must balance the cost and quality of service while adhering to several constraints, such as ride-time limits, bus capacities, and school-bell times. Of particular interest to LAUSD are the most efficient ways to handle “mixed-load routing,” in which students from multiple schools are picked up along the same route. This practice is particularly beneficial when routes for different schools need to traverse similar paths. In this project, the researchers developed computer algorithms, a software implementation, and a user interface that automatically generates bus routes and allows users to edit them.