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Maryland Association of Pupil Transportation (MAPT) conference. Te third area of our study was suggested by one of the audience members, Winship Wheatley, and inspired by the many what-if scenarios that we analyzed for the HCPSS. Te HCPSS requested that we analyze their school start and dismissal times. Tey wanted to change their high school, middle school and elementary school start times under certain constraints such that they could increase the efficiency of their school bus operations. We developed a model that optimizes the school bell times subject to constraints that require each of the elementary, middle and high school start times to fall within a prespecified time window. For example, the time window for elementary school start times would be from 8:15 to 9:25 a.m., for middle schools 7:40 to 8:30 a.m., and all high schools would start at 7:25 a.m. Our model takes the trips as inputs and finds the optimal combination of school dismissal times such that the number of school buses, which is the major contributing factor to costs, would be minimized. We found that, in most cases, optimizing the bell times results in significant savings regarding the number of buses. Our work related to optimizing school bus transportation continues by both enhancing our current models and developing new modules for further improv- ing the efficiency and reducing the costs. Some of the current work includes developing: • Models for optimal vendor selection for school districts that sign con- tracts with multiple vendors for their transportation needs
• Models for goal hour optimization for school districts that are interested in having most of their fleet running certain hours per day
• Models for bus allocation to routes that are based on their bus lot loca- tion and vendor costs
• Models for stop location selection and optimization. Ali Haghani, Ph.D.
Ali Haghani is a professor in the A. James Clark School of Engineering’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland. His focus is on transportation network modeling, dynamic fleet management, mass transit operations, freight transportation and logistics, and emergency response. He holds both a Ph.D. and master’s degree in civil engineering from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Pahlavi University in Iran.
Josh Rice
Dir. of Transportation New Caney ISD, TX
Ali Shafani, Ph.D
smart-tag.net 512.686.2360
sales@smart-tag.net 46 School Transportation News • APRIL 2017 CELEBRATING25YEARS
Ali Shafahi has a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Maryland that focuses on optimization and operations research. His expertise is in large scale optimization and data analysis. Many of the applications of his research focus on transportation. He has been involved with the problems related to school bus optimization since spring of 2015 and is continuing his research in optimization as a Ph.D. student in computer science at the College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences. ●
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