Modeling and Solving International Journey Planning Problems

The work presented in this paper aims to model and solve multi-criteria international itinerary planning problems The emerging itinerary planning problems are defined on a multimodal time-dependent transportation network that consists of hierarchically interconnected international, interurban and urban transportation networks. The itinerary planning problems under study fall into two major categories: i) static, and ii) dynamic. The static refers to journey planning decisions at the pre-trip phase while the dynamic refers to the journey ontrip re-planning problem. An overall solution approach was developed for solving the proposed international itinerary planning problems. This approach involves a pre-processing stage in which a customized international sub-network is designed and stored for each pair of potential origin and destination countries of a trip request. In this context, addressing any trip request involves recalling just the corresponding customized sub-network instead of the entire international transportation network. Subsequently the international itinerary planning problem is solved on the customized network leading to a list of alternative generic itineraries, i.e., itineraries for which only the international transportation links are fully specified.