Urban Bus Route Planning Method Integrating Heuristic and Non-Dominated Sorting Algorithms—A Case Study of Kunming, Yunnan Province, China, Bus Route 119

Urban transportation is a crucial aspect of modern societal development, with bus route optimization playing a central role in urban transit planning. Well-designed bus routes can enhance the efficiency and attractiveness of public transportation, alleviate traffic congestion and pollution, and ultimately contribute to the overall growth of a city. This study investigates the selection of bus stop locations and route optimization from three perspectives: population density, facility distribution, and route length. The main methodological contribution lies not in the Pareto filtering itself, but in the development of a unified pipeline. This pipeline first generates and prunes candidate stops by applying road-network and intersection-safety constraints. It then constructs feasible routes using a constraint-driven heuristic that enforces stop spacing, ensures monotonic progress away from the origin and toward the destination, and maintains route smoothness. Finally, it integrates population-grid and POI indicators into a tri-objective evaluation framework prior to non-dominated sorting. The proposed method for bus stop location and route optimization is universally applicable to urban bus routes and can be validated through case studies in different cities. An empirical analysis is conducted using Route 119 in Kunming City, Yunnan Province, as a case study. Compared with the original bus route, the optimized route demonstrates improvements of 18.26% in route distance, 15.79% in Points of Interest (POI) accessibility, and 10.53% in population coverage.