Fast Public Transit Routing with Unrestricted Walking through Hub Labeling

International audienceWe propose a novel technique for answering routing queries in public transportation networks that allows unrestricted walking. We consider several types of queries: earliest arrival time, Pareto-optimal journeys regarding arrival time, number of transfers and walking time, and profile, i.e. finding all Pareto-optimal journeys regarding travel time and arrival time in a given time interval. Our techniques uses hub labeling to represent unlimited foot transfers and can be adapted to both classical algorithms RAPTOR and CSA. We obtain significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art approach based on contraction hierarchies

Route Planning in Transportation Networks

We survey recent advances in algorithms for route planning in transportation networks. For road networks, we show that one can compute driving directions in milliseconds or less even at continental scale. A variety of techniques provide different trade-offs between preprocessing effort, space requirements, and query time. Some algorithms can answer queries in a fraction of a microsecond, while others can deal efficiently with real-time traffic. Journey planning on public transportation systems, although conceptually similar, is a significantly harder problem due to its inherent time-dependent and multicriteria nature. Although exact algorithms are fast enough for interactive queries on metropolitan transit systems, dealing with continent-sized instances requires simplifications or heavy preprocessing. The multimodal route planning problem, which seeks journeys combining schedule-based transportation (buses, trains) with unrestricted modes (walking, driving), is even harder, relying on approximate solutions even for metropolitan inputs.Comment: This is an updated version of the technical report MSR-TR-2014-4, previously published by Microsoft Research. This work was mostly done while the authors Daniel Delling, Andrew Goldberg, and Renato F. Werneck were at Microsoft Research Silicon Valle

UnLimited TRAnsfers for Multi-Modal Route Planning: An Efficient Solution

We study a multi-modal route planning scenario consisting of a public transit network and a transfer graph representing a secondary transportation mode (e.g., walking or taxis). The objective is to compute all journeys that are Pareto-optimal with respect to arrival time and the number of required transfers. While various existing algorithms can efficiently compute optimal journeys in either a pure public transit network or a pure transfer graph, combining the two increases running times significantly. As a result, even walking between stops is typically limited by a maximal duration or distance, or by requiring the transfer graph to be transitively closed. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel preprocessing technique called ULTRA (UnLimited TRAnsfers): Given a complete transfer graph (without any limitations, representing an arbitrary non-schedule-based mode of transportation), we compute a small number of transfer shortcuts that are provably sufficient for computing all Pareto-optimal journeys. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach by showing that these transfer shortcuts can be integrated into a variety of state-of-the-art public transit algorithms, establishing the ULTRA-Query algorithm family. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that ULTRA is able to improve these algorithms from limited to unlimited transfers without sacrificing query speed, yielding the fastest known algorithms for multi-modal routing. This is true not just for walking, but also for other transfer modes such as cycling or driving

Engineering Algorithms for Route Planning in Multimodal Transportation Networks

Practical algorithms for route planning in transportation networks are a showpiece of successful Algorithm Engineering. This has produced many speedup techniques, varying in preprocessing time, space, query performance, simplicity, and ease of implementation. This thesis explores solutions to more realistic scenarios, taking into account, e.g., traffic, user preferences, public transit schedules, and the options offered by the many modalities of modern transportation networks

Integrating ULTRA and Trip-Based Routing

We study a bi-modal journey planning scenario consisting of a public transit network and a transfer graph representing a secondary transportation mode (e.g., walking or cycling). Given a pair of source and target locations, the objective is to find a Pareto set of journeys optimizing arrival time and the number of required transfers. For public transit networks with a restricted, transitively closed transfer graph, one of the fastest known algorithms solving this bi-criteria problem is Trip-Based Routing [Witt, 2015]. However, this algorithm cannot be trivially extended to unrestricted transfer graphs. In this work, we combine Trip-Based Routing with ULTRA [Baum et al., 2019], a preprocessing technique that allows any public transit algorithm that requires transitive transfers to handle an unrestricted transfer graph. Since both ULTRA and Trip-Based Routing precompute transfer shortcuts in a preprocessing phase, a naive combination of the two leads to a three-phase algorithm that performs redundant work and produces superfluous shortcuts. We therefore propose a new, integrated preprocessing phase that combines the advantages of both and reduces the number of computed shortcuts by up to a factor of 9 compared to a naive combination. The resulting query algorithm, ULTRA-Trip-Based is the fastest known algorithm for the considered problem setting, achieving a speedup of up to 4 compared to the fastest previously known approach, ULTRA-RAPTOR

Integrating ULTRA and trip-based routing

We study a bi-modal journey planning scenario consisting of a public transit network and a transfer graph representing a secondary transportation mode (e.g., walking or cycling). Given a pair of source and target locations, the objective is to find a Pareto set of journeys optimizing arrival time and the number of required transfers. For public transit networks with a restricted, transitively closed transfer graph, one of the fastest known algorithms solving this bi-criteria problem is Trip-Based Routing [Witt, 2015]. However, this algorithm cannot be trivially extended to unrestricted transfer graphs. In this work, we combine Trip-Based Routing with ULTRA [Baum et al., 2019], a preprocessing technique that allows any public transit algorithm that requires transitive transfers to handle an unrestricted transfer graph. Since both ULTRA and Trip-Based Routing precompute transfer shortcuts in a preprocessing phase, a naive combination of the two leads to a three-phase algorithm that performs redundant work and produces superfluous shortcuts. We therefore propose a new, integrated preprocessing phase that combines the advantages of both and reduces the number of computed shortcuts by up to a factor of 9 compared to a naive combination. The resulting query algorithm, ULTRA-Trip-Based is the fastest known algorithm for the considered problem setting, achieving a speedup of up to 4 compared to the fastest previously known approach, ULTRA-RAPTOR

An efficient solution for one-to-many multi-modal journey planning

We study the one-to-many journey planning problem in multi-modal transportation networks consisting of a public transit network and an additional, non-schedule-based mode of transport. Given a departure time and a single source vertex, we aim to compute optimal journeys to all vertices in a set of targets, optimizing both travel time and the number of transfers used. Solving this problem yields a crucial component in many other problems, such as efficient point-of-interest queries, computation of isochrones, or multi-modal traffic assignments. While many algorithms for multi-modal journey planning exist, none of them are applicable to one-to-many scenarios. Our solution is based on the combination of two state-of-the-art approaches: ULTRA, which enables efficient journey planning in multi-modal networks, but only for one-to-one queries, and (R)PHAST, which enables efficient one-to-many queries, but only in time-independent networks. Similarly to ULTRA, our new approach can be combined with any existing public transit algorithm that allows a search to all stops, which we demonstrate for CSA and RAPTOR. For small to moderately sized target sets, the resulting algorithms are nearly as fast as the pure public transit algorithms they are based on. For large target sets, we achieve a speedup of up to 7 compared to a naive one-to-many extension of a state-of-the-art multi-modal approach

An Efficient Solution for One-To-Many Multi-Modal Journey Planning

We study the one-to-many journey planning problem in multi-modal transportation networks consisting of a public transit network and an additional, non-schedule-based mode of transport. Given a departure time and a single source vertex, we aim to compute optimal journeys to all vertices in a set of targets, optimizing both travel time and the number of transfers used. Solving this problem yields a crucial component in many other problems, such as efficient point-of-interest queries, computation of isochrones, or multi-modal traffic assignments. While many algorithms for multi-modal journey planning exist, none of them are applicable to one-to-many scenarios. Our solution is based on the combination of two state-of-the-art approaches: ULTRA, which enables efficient journey planning in multi-modal networks, but only for one-to-one queries, and (R)PHAST, which enables efficient one-to-many queries, but only in time-independent networks. Similarly to ULTRA, our new approach can be combined with any existing public transit algorithm that allows a search to all stops, which we demonstrate for CSA and RAPTOR. For small to moderately sized target sets, the resulting algorithms are nearly as fast as the pure public transit algorithms they are based on. For large target sets, we achieve a speedup of up to 7 compared to a naive one-to-many extension of a state-of-the-art multi-modal approach