Why This Matters

School transportation is a societal-scale transportation cyber-physical system serving 26 million students daily, yet it remains vulnerable to operational disruptions despite strict schedules and regulations. Most existing disruption management relies on manual coordination, while SchoolRide advances the state-of-the-art by demonstrating that systematic, data-driven optimization can enhance operational resilience at realistic scale. This work is innovative because it balances competing objectives—student service quality (waiting time, delays, schedule adherence) with operational efficiency—while respecting institutional constraints and preserving privacy through synthetic data generation.

What We Did

SchoolRide is a comprehensive cyber-physical system platform designed for school bus disruption management and operational resilience. The system integrates live telemetry, real-time status collection, and dynamic bus status monitoring to detect and respond to disruptions such as vehicle breakdowns, traffic congestion, and driver absences. Using an integrated pipeline that combines baseline routing with travel-time prediction and constrained optimization, SchoolRide automatically recomputes routing plans when disruptions occur. The platform serves as a testbed for evaluating data-driven optimization strategies for real-world school transportation systems with practical constraints.

Key Results

Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real district data demonstrate strong performance and scalability of the SchoolRide optimization approach. The AdVIns insertion heuristic consistently outperforms baseline human-intuition policies on student-centered metrics, achieving substantially lower average stop and school delays. Across large-scale synthetic instances and real district scenarios, the system effectively handles realistic disruption patterns while generating high-quality rerouting solutions that balance feasibility with optimality.

Full Abstract

Cite This Paper

@inproceedings{iccps2026_schoolride,
  author = {Nath, Vakul and Liu, Fangqi and He, Guocheng and Rogers, David and Chhokra, Ajay and Talusan, Jose Paolo and Ma, Meiyi and Mukhopadhyay, Ayan and Dubey, Abhishek},
  title = {SchoolRide: A Data-Driven Platform for School Bus Disruption Management},
  year = {2026},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the HSCC/ICCPS 2026: 29th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control and 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems},
  location = {Saint Malo, France},
  abstract = {As a societal-scale transportation Cyber-Physical System (CPS), school transportation integrates large-scale physical operations with cyber components for planning and control under uncertainty. Despite its scale and societal importance, the system remains vulnerable to operational disruptions such as vehicle breakdowns, road closures, traffic congestion, and driver absences. This work demonstrates how data-driven optimization can enhance operational resilience in a real-world school transit context. To advance research in this domain, we introduce SchoolRide, a platform developed in close collaboration with a school district in the southern United States. SchoolRide serves as a comprehensive testbed for studying and evaluating robust operational policies for disruption management, enabling systematic investigation of strategies under realistic data and operational constraints. We design an integrated pipeline for dynamic bus status collection and formulate the School Bus Disruption Management (SBDM) problem as a combinatorial optimization task that replans routes based on predefined schedules, real-time status, and disruption events. The framework balances student service quality (e.g., waiting time and school delays) with operational efficiency (e.g., route adjustments and driver workload). We explore heuristic and optimization-based approaches that leverage historical disruption logs from the partner district to proactively replan routes and evaluate their performance using synthetic data generated from real-world operational records to protect privacy. The generated synthetic datasets will be released to facilitate future research in this domain. Our approach outperforms current operational policies, effectively preserving service quality while reducing disruptions and workload.},
  keywords = {school transportation, disruption management, vehicle routing, optimization, cyber-physical systems, transit operations, real-time decision-making},
  note = {Acceptance rate: 28\%; Short Paper; Track: Systems and Applications},
  series = {HSCC/ICCPS '26}
}
Quick Info
Year 2026
Series HSCC/ICCPS '26
Keywords
school transportation disruption management vehicle routing optimization cyber-physical systems transit operations real-time decision-making
Research Areas
transit CPS planning
Search Tags

SchoolRide, Data, Driven, Platform, School, Disruption, Management, school transportation, disruption management, vehicle routing, optimization, cyber-physical systems, transit operations, real-time decision-making, transit, CPS, planning, 2026, Nath, Liu, He, Rogers, Chhokra, Talusan, Ma, Mukhopadhyay, Dubey, HSCC/ICCPS26