Publication Data
Fast Routing in Very Large Public Transportation Networks Using Transfer Patterns
Abstract: We show how to route on very large public transportation
networks (up to half a billion arcs) with average query times of a few milliseconds. We
take into account many realistic features like: traffic days, walking between stations,
queries between geographic locations instead of a source and a target station, and
multi-criteria cost functions. Our algorithm is based on two key observations: (1) many
shortest paths share the same transfer pattern, i.e., the sequence of stations where a
change of vehicle occurs; (2) direct connections without change of vehicle can be
looked up quickly. We precompute the respective data; in practice, this can be done in
time linear in the network size, at the expense of a small fraction of non-optimal
results. We have accelerated public transportation routing on Google Maps with a system
based on our ideas. We report experimental results for three data sets of various kinds
and sizes.
