Transcolar Rural New Route Cost Calculation Software and Cost Analysis Tool

In Brazil, 4.2 million children depend on rural school transport. Due to the lack of resources, it is mandatory to look for options to minimize costs. The Transcolar Rural project proposes a solution to optimize school transportation in the most undeveloped regions of Brazil's rural areas. A problem detected in the country's education is the high rate of school dropout that may be due to school transport. The project aims to reduce evasion and proposes to implement efficient methods of routing optimization and cost calculation. The project consists of creating a large database of geographical coordinates for the students, schools, and roads, creating and optimizing routes, and calculating the approximate cost of each new route generated. The new route cost model is an update that makes it more transparent, personalized, and adaptable. The more than 60 parameters used in the cost calculation (eg fuel price) can be edited to determine the individual price of each route in a city. The new editable parameters increase possible data entry errors by users. To identify these errors, a cost analysis methodology that uses statistical process control and normal approximations was developed. A program that applies the methodology to each parameter of the cost model was created in order to evaluate the final cost of each route. This allows the final value of all routes in a city to be compared with others, finding those with the highest probability of error and proposing the analysis to solve the problem.