Distributed approach for solving time-dependent problems in multimodal transport networks

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative approach for time-dependent multimodal transport problem. We describe a new graph structure to abstract multimodal networks, called transfer graph, which adapts to the distributed nature of real information sources of transportation networks. A decomposition of the Shortest Path Problem in transfer graph is proposed to optimize the computation time. This approach was computationally tested in several experimental multimodal networks having different size and complexity. The approach was integrated in the multimodal transport service of the European Carlink platform, where it has been validated in real scenarios. Comparision with other related works is provided. © 2009 Carlos Galvez-Fernandez et al.