Products for Schools
Our products help school districts transport students to school safely, reliably, and efficiently. We can help you lower the cost of school bus transportation and alleviate your driver shortage without compromising on the quality you promise to families.
Want to know how this works? Watch our video.
For more details, check out our full presentation at the 2019 INFORMS Franz Edelman Awards with Boston Public Schools.
School district transportation directors like Ron and Terry face massive problems today, including rising budgetary pressures and a severe driver shortage.
Fortunately, AlphaRoute can solve these problems and so much more, as Terry found out here.
Transportation Director Dan faced a driver shortage and kept losing more drivers than he could hire. AlphaRoute saved his school year by optimizing his routes and cutting 81 buses from his fleet! Follow his story here.
Multi School Bus Routing
The first fully-automated school bus routing system available anywhere. Our routing system is built with an intuitive transportation management platform and powered by an MIT-developed optimization engine.
We deliver not only safe, efficient bus routes across an entire School District…
…but also satisfied students, parents, drivers, and administrators.
Our multi-school bus routing product includes 6 cutting edge modules to power school district operations and provide parents, students, drivers, and administrators with real-time information.
Routing Engine and Interface
- Optimize routes for all schools holistically, not for single schools independently
- Maximize bus re-utilization rates
- Minimize the number of monitors on-board and keep them on the same bus throughout the day
- Re-optimize routes as needed to address district or student information changes while minimizing changes across the network.
- Fully account for student accommodations (door-to-door service, monitors, etc.)
- Optimize student to stop assignment respecting maximum safe walking distance
- Reduce transportation costs while ensuring safe, reliable transportation
Driver App
- Turn-by-turn directions
- List of stops for each route
- Student list for each stop
- Real-time driver-dispatcher communication
- Live traffic information
Parents & Schools App
- Real time information for parents and school administrators
- Student on-board / off-board notifications
- Route alerts
- Parent / District communications
- Bus arrival notifications
Student Information Management
- Comprehensive student information database
- Easy to update and manage information
- Flexible: manual assignments of students to stops
- Customizable routes for students with special needs
- Real-time alerts to transportation staff
- AI-powered suggestions for route updates & modifications
Fleet, Routes & Monitor Management
- Easy to view and adjust schedules, vehicle types and seating capacities
- Manages multiple providers and garage locations
- Real-time feedback on potential changes to transportation officers and parents.
- Easy to assign vehicles to routes
- Printable turn by turn directions for drivers
- Real-time alerts by route
- Integration with Flexible Routing product
- Performance dashboards
- Extensive operational reports and export to Excel function
Communications Module
- Messages to parents and students via:
- SMS
- Call
- App
- At-scale messages to groups or all parents (weather, school closures, etc.)
- Individual route alerts
Student Assignment
A first-of-its-kind tool for School Districts looking to adjust their student assignment system. Districts often shift neighborhood school boundaries or change school choice policies without a full understanding of the equity and financial implications of these decisions. Our Student Assignment product accounts for public policy and community-based priorities and produces multiple assignment models for discussion that optimize for these and other criteria.
Our Student Assignment product features:
- An analytics approach to a public policy problem
- Ability to rebalance demographics and economic disparity within schools districts while controlling for transportation cost and parent satisfaction
- Multi objective optimization:
- Equity
- Home-to-school distance
- Savings
- Parents satisfaction
- Other district-established priorities
- Extensive consulting support from practitioners who have experienced district-wide changes to student assignment
- Multiple tradeoff scenarios for discussions with community
- Potential for additional, significant reduction in the number of routes if combined with Multi-School Bus Routing
Flexible Routing
School bus routing involves far more than just home to school transportation. Extra-curricular activities, field trips, and special events, all require customized transportation planning and flexible routing.
Our Flexible Routing product features:
- Fully optimized non-static routes for maximum efficiency
- Flexibility allowing transportation staff to schedule and create new routes in minutes
- User friendly functionality for non-standard activities:
- Field trips
- Athletics
- Students with multiple addresses
- Other alternative routing needs
- Comprehensive support for students with special needs
- Up to 30% reduction in the number of alternative routes
- Full integration with Multi-School Bus Routing
Bell times optimization
A first-of-its-kind product that uses multi-purpose optimization to define ideal start and end times for each school, based on multiple public policy and school community criteria. More and more districts are responding to compelling national research on the value of shifting high school start times later to promote better health and academic outcomes for students. Our Bell Times Optimization product helps districts to do this as efficiently as possible.
Combined with Multi School Bus Routing, Bell Times Optimization can deliver significant additional savings that can be reinvested into classrooms.
Our Bell Times Optimization product features:
- An analytics approach to a public policy problem
- Multi objective optimization, generating efficient solutions that account for:
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- Student health
- Equity
- Savings
- Parents satisfaction
- Special needs
- Extensive consulting support from practitioners who have changed districtwide start-times
- Multiple trade-off scenarios for discussions with community
- Full integration with Multi-School Bus Routing
- Potential for additional, significant reduction in the number of routes if combined with Multi-School Bus Routing
Watch this quick video below to learn more
