Comparative Analysis between Routing Methods Systems Applied to the Rural School Transport Problem in Brazil

Marcelo Franco Porto, Nilson Tadeu Ramos Nunes, Izabela Ribas Vianna de Carvalho, Raphael Bruno Alves Teixeira, Marina Oliveira Fonseca, Lucas Vinicius Ribeiro Alves, Renata Maria Abrantes Baracho

The Rural School Transport has particularities such as the complexity of the routes, the students’ dispersion in the geographic areas, the practical costs and the lack of capable professionals to work with geographical data. For this reason, the solution of the rural school transport routing problem requires an application of specific methodologies.

The School of Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (UFMG) developed a tool entitled TRANSCOLAR to calculate school bus routing. The implanted methodology allows the georeferencing of every existing school, student and route, thereby enabling the optimization of these routes and providing better-qualified transport at a lower cost to the population.

The assumption was that the model should be intuitively handled, so the platform was designed for web-format use, personalized for rural school transport, in which the commands are easily utilized, dismissing a geoprocessing specialist for its application.

In the present article, the proposed model is compared to traditional routing softwares: TransCAD and ArcGIS. The city of Santa Leopoldina/ES, in Brazil was chosen as a case study. The objective of this article is to evaluate the benefits added to the new proposed methodology.

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