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Passenger routing for periodic timetable optimization

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Abstract

The task of periodic timetabling is to determine trip arrival and departure times in a public transport system such that travel and transfer times are minimized. This paper investigates periodic timetabling models with integrated passenger routing. We show that different routing models can have a huge influence on the quality of the entire system: Whatever metric is applied, the performance ratios of timetables w.r.t. different routing models can be arbitrarily large. Computations on a real-world instance for the city of Wuppertal substantiate the theoretical findings. These results indicate the existence of untapped optimization potentials that can be used to improve the efficiency of public transport systems by integrating passenger routing.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the editors and two anonymous referees for valuable suggestions that improved the presentation of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zuse-Institute Berlin, Takustr. 7, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Ralf Borndörfer, Heide Hoppmann & Marika Karbstein

Authors
  1. Ralf Borndörfer
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  2. Heide Hoppmann
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  3. Marika Karbstein
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Heide Hoppmann.

Additional information

This research was carried out in the framework of Matheon supported by Einstein Foundation Berlin.

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Borndörfer, R., Hoppmann, H. & Karbstein, M. Passenger routing for periodic timetable optimization. Public Transp 9, 115–135 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-016-0132-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-016-0132-0

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