A means of providing public transport information to passengers who may not know where they are going!

Abstract

The particular form of the problem investigated in this paper is that encountered by job seekers (and those looking for employment related training courses). These people are often the least likely in society to have access to a car and therefore rely on public transport. However, current Web-based job vacancy search services fail to account for this: job seekers are supplied with numerous vacancies that match their employment preferences, but give no indication whether they can actually get to them without their own transport. To make individual queries to a public transport information service such as the Traveline journey planner for each returned vacancy is not an acceptable solution. Job seekers are known to become disillusioned with the job vacancy information provided because they see too much of it as being not relevant to them - in short, they want a more personalised service. This paper looks at a novel approach for combining sources of information on trip purpose with public transport information to provide users with one-stop solutions to the above type of query.