Abstract
The problem statement tackled in this paper is concentrated on the school bus routing problem (SBRP) in urban areas. This problem is a variant of the vehicle routing problem where we identify three simultaneous decisions that have to be made: determining the set of stops to visit, for each student which stop he should walk to and the latter case occurs when determining the routes visited with the chosen stops, so that the total traveled distance is minimized. Accordingly, to the Tunisian case study and the difficulty to solve it in a manual manner we resort to metaheuristic approaches. We have developed a hybrid evolutionary computation based on an artificial ant colony with a variable neighborhood local search algorithm. Empirically we demonstrate that our algorithm yields consistently better results. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.