We study the problem of computing all Pareto-optimal journeys in a public transit network regarding the two criteria of arrival time and number of transfers taken. We take a novel approach, focusing on trips and transfers between them, allowing fine-grained modeling. Our experiments on the metropolitan network of London show that the algorithm computes full 24-hour profiles in 70ms after a preprocessing phase of 30s, allowing fast queries in dynamic scenarios.
Some existing approaches solve these problems by modeling timetable information as a graph, using either the or the model. In the (simple) time-expanded model, a node is introduced for each event, such as a train departing or arriving at a station. Edges are then added to connect nodes on the same trip, as well as between nodes belonging to the same stop (corresponding to a passenger waiting for the next train). To model minimum change times, additional nodes and edges are required @cite_14 . One advantage of this model is that all edge weights are constant, which allows the use of speedup techniques developed for road networks, such as contraction. Unfortunately, it turns out that due to different network structures, these techniques do not perform as well for public transit networks @cite_15 . Also, time-expanded graphs are rather large.
@cite_15 @cite_14
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We consider two approaches that model timetable information in public transportation systems as shortest-path problems in weighted graphs. In the time-expanded approach, every event at a station, e.g., the departure of a train, is modeled as a node in the graph, while in the time-dependent approach the graph contains only one node per station. Both approaches have been recently considered for (a simplified version of) the earliest arrival problem, but little is known about their relative performance. Thus far, there are only theoretical arguments in favor of the time-dependent approach. In this paper, we provide the first extensive experimental comparison of the two approaches. Using several real-world data sets, we evaluate the performance of the basic models and of several new extensions towards realistic modeling. Furthermore, new insights on solving bicriteria optimization problems in both models are presented. The time-expanded approach turns out to be more robust for modeling more complex scenarios, whereas the time-dependent approach shows a clearly better performance. We consider the application of route planning in large public-transportation networks (buses, trains, subways, etc). Many connections in such networks are operated at periodic time intervals. When a set of connections has sufficient periodicity, it becomes more efficient to store the time range and frequency (e.g., every 15 minutes from 8:00am-6:00pm) instead of storing each of the time events separately. Identifying an optimal frequency-compression is NP-hard, so we present a time- and space-efficient heuristic. We show how we can use this compression to not only save space but also query time. We particularly consider profile queries, which ask for all optimal routes with departure times in a given interval (e.g., a whole day). In particular, we design a new version of Dijkstra's algorithm that works with frequency-based labels and is suitable for profile queries. We evaluate the savings of our approach on two metropolitan and three country-wide public-transportation networks. On our largest network, we simultaneously achieve a better space consumption than all previous methods as well as profile query times that are about 5 times faster than the best previous method. We also improve Transfer Patterns, a state-of-the-art technique for fully realistic route planning in large public-transportation networks. In particular, we accelerate the expensive preprocessing by a factor of 60 compared to the original publication. A public transportation network can often be modeled as a timetable graph where (i) each node represents a station; and (ii) each directed edge (u,v) is associated with a timetable that records the departure (resp. arrival) time of each vehicle at station u (resp. v). Several techniques have been proposed for various types of route planning on timetable graphs, e.g., retrieving the route from a node to another with the shortest travel time. These techniques, however, either provide insufficient query efficiency or incur significant space overheads. This paper presents Timetable Labelling (TTL), an efficient indexing technique for route planning on timetable graphs. The basic idea of TTL is to associate each node @math with a set of labels, each of which records the shortest travel time from u to some other node v given a certain departure time from u; such labels would then be used during query processing to improve efficiency. In addition, we propose query algorithms that enable TTL to support three popular types of route planning queries, and investigate how we reduce the space consumption of TTL with advanced preprocessing and label compression methods. By conducting an extensive set of experiments on real world datasets, we demonstrate that TTL significantly outperforms the states of the art in terms of query efficiency, while incurring moderate preprocessing and space overheads. We contribute a fast routing algorithm for timetable networks with realistic transfer times. In this setting, our algorithm is the first one that successfully applies precomputation based on node contraction: gradually removing nodes from the graph and adding shortcuts to preserve shortest paths. This reduces query times to 0.5 ms with preprocessing times below 4 minutes on all tested instances, even on continental networks with 30 000 stations. We achieve this by an improved contraction algorithm and by using a station graph model. Every node in our graph has a one-to-one correspondence to a station and every edge has an assigned collection of connections. Also, our graph model does not require parallel edges.