Heuristic approach for solving employee bus routes in a large-scale industrial factory

We then used ant colony optimization (ACO) to determine the optimal routing between the 300-700 bus stops as allocated by K-means with Maximin. The optimal bus routing to transport the factory's 5000 plus employees required 134 buses (134 independent routes) covering 500 bus stops and traveling nearly 5000 km. While optimal, this routing was costly and created monitoring difficulties. To address these concerns, we constrained the number of bus routes; while this dramatically increased the total distance, it provided a more practical solution for the factory.