We are seeking a highly motivated RPI undergraduate or master's student to join a research project focused on developing optimization methods for collaborative school transportation planning. The position is available as a paid hourly research assistantship or for academic credit, depending on the student's interests and eligibility.
Project Overview
School districts across New York face increasing operational and financial challenges in transporting students to educational placements outside their home district boundaries. Although neighboring districts often transport students to similar destinations, transportation planning is typically performed independently, resulting in duplicated routes, underutilized buses, higher costs, and increased strain on an already limited school bus driver workforce.
This project will develop an optimization-based decision support framework that enables multiple school districts to coordinate transportation resources for out-of-district students. Using transportation data from participating districts and candidate transfer locations, the project will identify opportunities for resource sharing and quantify potential savings in transportation costs, mileage, driver requirements, and student travel time while maintaining service requirements.
Student Responsibilities
- Coding vehicle routing solution methods using existing optimization packages and solution approaches.
- Data cleaning and preparation to feed data sets into optimization models.
- Running computational experiments and analyzing results of transportation planning scenarios.
- Developing visualization of proposed solutions.
Preferred Qualifications
- Strong programming skills.
- Background in optimization, operations research, mathematical programming, or related areas.
- Experience with optimization software (e.g., Gurobi, CPLEX, Pyomo, JuMP, OR-Tools, or similar) is highly desirable.
- Good communication skills.
How to Apply
Please email the following materials to Prof. Jennifer Pazour (pazouj@rpi.edu) and Prof. Bahar Cavdar (cavdab2@rpi.edu) by Tuesday, September 1:
- Resume
- Unofficial transcript
- One-paragraph statement of interest (why are you interested, what past experiences do you have that make you a great candidate for this position).
Decisions will be made by September 7th. The project is planned for the fall semester, with approximately 5-10 hours per week. The pay rate will be $16 per hour. Opportunities for extensions are possible based on performance and funding availability.
We encourage undergraduate or masters students from Industrial & Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and related disciplines to apply.
We look forward to hearing from interested students!
Professors Jen Pazour and Bahar Cavdar
Industrial & Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
