Integration of Real-Time Mapping Technology in Disaster Relief Distribution

Background: Travel reliability is a critical dimension in the user experience of public transportation services. Next only to travel time, commuters in the Chicago metropolitan area identified reliability as the second most important factor that affects their mode and route choice through a survey conducted by Northwestern and the CTA in a previous CCITT study (Nie, Wu, Zissman, Lee & Haynes 2010). Almost half of the commuters surveyed described their transit service as “unreliable.” Furthermore, transit systems are affected by uncertainties of various sorts, ranging from extreme weather conditions and serious traffic accidents to unforeseeable mechanical failures and human errors. While these uncertainties could adversely disrupt transit services, the overall impacts are rarely documented and understood in existing systems. As a result, neither transit operators nor transit users are able to make proactive decisions to ensure travel reliability. Ignoring the impacts of uncertainties often results in misallocation of limited resources in the transit system. From the user point of view, the lack of reliability either encourages overly conservative riskaverse behavior or leads to uncomfortable, sometimes disastrous, disruptions.