Computer-Aided Planning of Radial and Diameter Routes in Local Public Transport Networks

Abstract

Local public transport network planning is a complex procedure affected by many aspects (e.g., city structure, travel needs, the budget for the service, vehicle types, service frequencies, timetable optimization of parallel routes etc.). Due to the high number of possible solutions, finding the optimum is usually a problem with NP computational complexity. Although an extensive toolkit is available for evaluating specific networks, the number of versions that can be realistically examined and compared is highly limited. This implies that the routine and creativity of the network planning specialists play an important role in the selection of the examined networks. However, in some special cases, the search space can be narrowed so that all network versions can be automatically generated and compared. This paper presents such a case: when applying radial and diameter routes only, the main question is which directions should be connected to each other as a diameter route, or left alone as a radial line. The algorithm is presented on the example of the city Győr.