Route-Information Management and Provision for Public Transportation Systems

We propose a framework for management of route information and provision of travel information in the context of public transportation systems. The information-management component combines information collected from diverse sources, and processes the information for the interests of service providers and travelers. Travelers may place queries via different types of devices and interfaces, and receives travel information in HTML, WML, graphic, and audio formats. The information-provision component computes the desired information and converts the information into appropriate output formats. In particular, we present two algorithms that take advantage of special characteristics of public transportation systems to compute travel plans efficiently. We discuss possible ways for integrating our algorithms with existing pathplanning algorithms for prioritizing alternative travels plans based on time-independent and time-dependent costs. Results and feedbacks collected from an open field test, that is available at , indicate that our algorithms can compute satisfactory travel plans within a couple of seconds for a public transportation system with approximately 280 routes serving 2500 stops.