Drawing bus routes for Boston Public Schools involves challenges unique to the city. BPS allows parents to select their child’s school from a list of about ten options, in an effort to reduce inequalities that might result from isolating students to their neighborhoods…

With no clear vendor to turn to with this problem, BPS instead sought out experts, hosting a competition where researchers could experiment with anonymized BPS data sets to create efficient routes and optimal start times for each school…

Considering all those possibilities creates a “number of solutions so large that you can’t even enumerate it,” said Arthur Delarue, a PhD candidate who worked with the team from the MIT Operations Research Center whose algorithm won the competition. The team spent hundreds of hours devising a solution to what Delarue called a “bold and unusual” challenge.
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