It’s goodbye to antiquated tools like
string, grease pencils and push-pins as route optimization software is the new transportation department mainstay
WRITTEN BY ERIC WOOLSON
I
f there’s one thing pupil transportation technology has in common with other technology it’s that innovation never stops, according to the experts who design it and those who rely on it. And, the route optimization software recently developed by a University of Maryland (UMD) College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences team led by Dr. Ali Haghani for
the Howard County Public School System outside of Baltimore illustrates that story well, said transportation director David W. Ramsay. “When you look at the evolution of routing school buses before computers, we used the old
grease pencils on laminated maps or pins and yarn to connect everything,” recalled Ramsey, now marking his 30th year in pupil transportation. “Like technology in general, there’s been an evo- lution over the years. I believe Dr. Haghani and his team are doing cutting-edge work and we’re very, very excited to be working with them.” Te mathematical model devised by Haghani and his team uses data on routes, stops and schedules to cluster the most efficient trips into new routes. Te result is routing that requires the fewest buses to safely get the district’s 40,000 students to and from school, keeps students’ time on buses to a minimum and reduces the amount of deadhead time and overall miles driven. “School bus operations are usually so expensive that improving efficiency by only a few
percentage points could mean savings on the order of millions of dollars,” said Dr. Ali Shafahi, a member of Haghani’s team. “But these potential reductions are significant not just in terms of transportation dollars saved but also for the cuts to fuel consumption and air pollutants that come with fewer buses on the road.” (See sidebar for more on this project.) Howard County was already using some routing software in 2015, but Ramsay said it lacked some of the functionality his team wanted. When reaching out to the private and public sectors for solutions, he connected with UMD’s Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) Honors Program for undergraduate students to create a method for analyzing the efficiency of the district’s transportation system. “We recognized this was a very, very complex problem. With a short timeline, the team fulfilled several of the district’s deliverables, but not all of them,” Ramsay said. “Dr. Haghani thought the problems were fascinating and he started to work on them.”
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