O Problema de nucleação de alunos no transporte escolar

Abstract

The management of school transportation has considered relevance to the reach of education to different spheres of society, as it is for some students the only means of access and permanence in the school environment. For this reason, government programs such as the National Programme for School Transportation, in Brazil, aims the financial contribution to the acquisition of buses for municipalities. However, the measure is not a solution in itself, because before offering the service, there is the need to route the journey that the bus must do to meet satisfactorily all the claimant students, which directly reflects on the performance of economic, operational and social outcomes of the institutions involved. In this framework, the Student Nucleation Problem on the School Transport (Nucleação de Alunos no Transporte Escolar) is addressed, which consists of allocating each student, in his respective grade, in the nearest possible school to his residence, considering the capacity that each school grade has to meet the demand. Therefore, the aim is to optimize the groupings formed in such a manner to reduce the journey of transfer of the student to the school, which results in an optimization of time, reduction of travel costs, better student welfare and an increment in the process of learning. To accomplish this task, the present work aims to propose a mathematical model to cluster students, by grade, in each school. The proposed formulation is applied to a case study in the city of Maranguape, State of Ceará, Brazil, presenting consistente results