Developing a GIS for Rural School Transportation in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Marcelo Franco Porto, Stanislas Thiéry, Nilson Tadeu Ramos Nunes, Izabela Ribas Vianna de Carvalho, João Fernando Machry Sarubbi, Cristiano Maciel da Silva

This Report aims to give a detailed account of the study of rural school transportation in Minas Gerais and propose a routing method to create better routes to attend rural students and schools. The federal government of Minas Gerais launched a three-year program to establish new school bus lines in rural parts of the state. This government project’s goal is to give better access to basic services such as schooling in poorer areas of the country in order to contribute to their development and make their life conditions better.

The situation of rural school transportation in Brazil is shown in this paper. The analysis of the conditions of school transportation and comparison with school transportation in other countries, such as the United States or France, will show that action is necessary for the development of rural areas of the state.

This will bring to introduce the new federal government project that aims to create new school bus lines around the state to guarantee better access to education. In this very important project, which has many different universities and private companies are working on, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, with the Transport laboratory NucleTrans, held by Pr. Marcelo Franco Porto, has been given the task to establish a routing method to be used on the municipalities concerned by the project, and establish a methodology.

In order to understand how a methodology can be established for school bus routing, it is necessary to contextualize the different existing methods for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). Thus, the focus was turned upon the heuristic methods that are able to find a "good" solution to the problem.

The performance of the heuristics was tested for the city of Governador Valadares. The results of this test were also discussed in this paper.

Full Text