Arrival time dependent routing policies in public transport

Abstract

We present a routing system that considers uncertainties, which are prevalent in any real transport system. Given desired departure or arrival times and a utility function representing the traveller's preferences, our method computes not just a single path through the network, but a more sophisticated and adaptive journey plan called routing policy. For each stop and time instance, a policy specifies the list of services that the passenger is recommended to take. We show that the problem of finding an optimal policy is NP-hard. We also give a polynomial-time algorithm for a relaxation of the problem when the number of recommended services is limited at each stop and time. A computational case study for the public transport network of Budapest shows that the obtained routing policies can lead to substantial travel time savings compared to deterministic plans, and that considering multiple service policies leads to an improvement compared to previous solutions using single-service policies.