Automatic Generation of Spider Maps for Providing Public Transports Information

Abstract

With the continuous growth and complexity of public transport systems, it is essential that the users have access to transport maps that help them easily understand the underlying network, thus facilitating the user experience and public transports ridership. Spider Maps combine elements from geographical and schematic maps, to allow answering questions like “From where I am, where can I go?”. Although these maps could be very useful for travellers, they still are mostly manually generated and not widely used. Moreover, these maps have several design constraints, which turns the automation of the generation process into a complex problem. Although optimisation techniques can be applied to support the generation process, current solutions are time expensive and require heavy computational power. This paper presents a solution to automatically generate spider maps. It proposes an algorithm that adapts current methods and generates viable spider map solutions in a short execution time. Results show successful spider maps solutions for areas in Porto city.