Modeling and analysis of bus scheduling systems of an urban public bus transport enterprise

[Essouaied Aziz]

Hello GAMS community;

I hope I could get some help on this one.

I'm going to work for an urban public bus transport enterprise, it is an enterprise using about 50 bus (between big buses and what's called "mini-buses", the difference is in the number of seats).

I was wondering: How could I approach a problem in which I would try to minimize the cost of running of the buses of this company? What is the sort of data that I could ask for (number of active buses, bus stops and depots network, trips scheduelings and periods, distance between stops and cities, prices of trips, ...).
Also, there is the idea of solving the problem by trying to maximise the number of passengers per each trip, so that buses won't leave stops empty, which is also seen as a big lost for the company.
I still don't have any fixed model for the current time, yet how could one approach that problem in a way that it would be logical and justifiable. Also, I do hope that I don't get in troule with unavailable data and so on.

Thanks for the help.