COMPUTER-AIDED SCHOOL BUS ROUTING

Bus transportation is a large expense for many school districts. Reducing this cost is the objective of the Transportation Information Management System (TIMS), which all 133 school districts in North Carolina use. This personal computer-based decision support system (DSS) lets local school districts create efficient routes and schedules for their school buses.

TIMS has four modules: (1) geocoding, which digitizes the school district's street network maps; (2) transportation, which maintains all routing and scheduling information, including the location of each student; (3) optimization, which tries to identify the least costly bus routes and schedules and enables administrators to perform "what if?" analyses; and (4) boundary planning, which provides demographic data on students.

TIMS's data base contains information on the district's streets and roads, bus travel speed, student locations, bus stops, bus runs, and bus routes. The models are designed to determine how to reduce the time and distance of all bus runs based on the capacity of each bus. In tests in the Randolph County school district, TIMS reduced school bus mileage by 6 percent and was instrumental in reassigning or parking nine buses.

A widely used spin-off of the primary purpose of TIMS is the boundary planning module. This module allows administrators to plan school attendance districts based on student location information stored in the TIMS data base. It provides administrators with precise information about number of students, racial makeup of the student population, and distribution of students across grades for analyzing existing, new, or proposed attendance boundaries.

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