Automated Tour Planning for Driving Service of Children with Disabilities: A Web-Based Platform and a Case Study

In this paper, we focus on a real-world problem called Kindergarten Tour Planning Problem (KTPP), which corresponds to a case study. In the KTPP, the objective consists in running a driving service for a group of children with disabilities to a central kindergarten. We formulate this problem as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP), which can be solved by any standard MILP solver. However, for practical use, we designed a simple yet effective heuristic to find good-quality solutions in short computation time. We conducted computational experiments, on randomly generated instances, to verify effectiveness of our heuristic by benchmarking it versus the state-of-the-art solver Gurobi Optimizer. Moreover, we introduce and present a publicly-available web-based platform that we have developed for practical use.