Optimizing bus schedulling for school bus routing problem: a case study of Dar es Salaam

School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP) deals with how to transport students to and from their schools. Informal SBRP can be defined as: Given a set of fleet of buses of a school, a set of bus stops, the time matrix and the number of students at each stop, the task is to determine how the buses can be scheduled in order to minimize amount of time students spend in the buses on the way to the school. This problem arises in many schools, many parents are complaining that buses take more travelling time than expected for their kids to get to school and home. Hence, there is a need to find a way of minimizing the students travelling time. The school bus routing problem is a special case of the vehicle routing problem (VRP)and is known to be an NP-hard, means it is very unlikely that the problem can be solved in polynomial time. One of the methods used to solve NP-hard problems and any optimization problem is heuristic algorithm which solve an instance of the given problem very fast without giving a guarantee that the solution is optimal. In this study a heuristic algorithm was developed for approximate solution to SBRP using Tabu Search. The algorithm has been programmed using Borland C++ 4.5 programming language and implemented using secondary data from Tusiime Nursery and Primary School, Alpha High School and Academy International School. The proposed implementation results in reducing students’ travelling time by 19:24% for Tusiime Nursery and Primary School, 13:5% for Academy International School and 22:8% for Alpha High School.