Audenaert, Pieter

Colle, Didier

Walcarius, Thijs

Audenaert, P.

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

Efficient routing with multiple route plannersThijs WalcariusInformation Technology, Ghent UniversitySupervisor(s): Didier Colle, Pieter AudenaertNothing is more fun than exploring the world around you. When travelling by public transport,one of the biggest challenges is to find the best route from point A to point B. This becomes harderas the number of possible transportation modes grows. For example: how do I get from Ghent,Belgium to Canterbury, England? Can I take the Eurostar-train to Ashford and transfer on a localtrain? Do I drive up to Dunkerque to take the ferry, or do I better take the one in Ostend?Many efforts have been made to create one big route planner that unites all possible forms oftransport (e.g. Google Transit). Currently, these initiatives require the raw data of the transit net-works to be able to incorporate them. However, the exchange of this data knows many legal andtechnical issues: whos responsible for faulty routes? How can last minute schedule changes becommunicated? etc.In practice, most public transit companies have a route planner available on their website. Com-bining these route planners into one global system would solve the current problems. The infor-mation required by the global system is reduced to a minimum: only the locations of the stations isknown. Trying to find the optimal solution in a straightforward manner would result in hundredsto thousands of requests. As each request to a route planner costs at least a few 100 milliseconds,making that many requests is out of the question.A request consists out of three components: the source station, the target station and the depar-ture time. The problem can be reduced to the following question: which pairs of stations providethe best routes? By using a few heuristics, we try to determine those pairs. The most promisingheuristic looks at the result of previous requests: station pairs that proved to have a good con-nection in the past, probably will have a good connection now. Other heuristics, for exampleidentifying important transportation hubs, look promising but have yet to be optimized.

Efficient routing with multiple route planners

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/3260557/file/3260558

Efficient routing with multiple route planners

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Ghent University Academic Bibliography