How Leeds has changed the world

Drs Sarah Fores, Ann Kwan, Raymond Kwan, Margaret Parker, Les Proll, and Barbara Smith, and Emeritus Professor Tony Wren, Faculty of Engineering

In 1984, London Transport adopted the world's first full bus driver scheduling system in a major city. It was developed at Leeds, and went on to transform the way transport is scheduled around the world.

Bus driver scheduling is a big mathematical problem. It can be easy to formulate but the model is difficult to solve. The team at the University of Leeds planned their research around developing techniques to solve the formulas quickly.

Previously it took a large, highly-skilled team of schedulers more than a year to reschedule the London Transport bus fleet by hand, and it was impossible to react quickly to changing demand and working conditions. Yet just one month after the company adopted the system, a single person was producing schedules for a sixth of the fleet.

The benefits have led numerous transport companies to adopt the software, and after 1991 the team at the University redeveloped the system to handle even more complex scheduling problems in train and bus services.