Accommodating user preferences in the optimization of public transport travel

Abstract

Traffic congestion is becoming a serious problem in more and more modern cities.Encouraging more private-vehicle drivers to use public transportation is one of the most effective and economical ways to reduce the ever increasing congestion problem on the streets (Hartley and Bargiela, 2001).To make public transport services more attractive and competitive, providing travellers with individual travel advice for journeys becomes crucial.However, with the massive and complex network of a modern city, finding one or several suitable route(s) according to user preferences from one place to another is not a simple task.In this paper, the author presents and compares two solutions to accommodate public transport users' preferences.The first approach is using three different single-purpose shortest path algorithms to accommodate three different user preferences.And the second approach is using the K-shortest paths algorithm to compute a reasonable number of ranked shortest paths, with the ultimate 'most optimal' path being selected by consideration of the preferences.Some experiments have been done based on the public transportation network of Nottingham City.