Route-information management and provision for public transportation systems.

The authors 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 receive 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, the authors present two algorithms that take advantage of special characteristics of public transportation systems to compute travel plans efficiently. They discuss possible ways for integrating their algorithms with existing pathplanning algorithms for prioritizing alternative travels plans based on time-independent and time-dependent costs. Results and feedback collected from an open field test, that are available at <http://iris.cs.ntou.edu.tw&gt;, indicate that their algorithms can compute satisfactory travel plans within a couple of seconds for a public transportation system with approximately 280 routes serving 2500 stops.