Bus Assignment to Iranian Pilgrims During Pilgrimage

Abstract

Among the multitude of activities of Hajj Organization which require careful planning bus assignment to the Iranian pilgrim caravans d g pilgrimage is the most important one. The objective of this assignment is to have a minimum number o standing passengers/empty seats, while satisfying a large number of operational and religious constrain. This problem was formulated as a large scale zero-one programming model which had to be solved heuristically. In this paper, the special nature of the problem was exploited which allowed it to be reformulated as a Linear Programming model. Computational experience with the actual data shows the success of this new approach.