A Real-time Information System for Public Transport in Case of Delays and Service Disruptions

Abstract

Promoting the use of public transportation and Intelligent Transport Systems, as well as improving transit accessibility for all citizens, may help in decreasing traffic congestion and air pollution in urban areas. In general, poor information to customers is one of the main issues in public transportation services, which is an important reason for allocating substantial efforts to implement a powerful and easy to use and access information tool. This paper focuses on the design and development of a real time mobility information system for the management of unexpected events, delays and service disruptions concerning public transportation in the city of Milan. Exploiting the information on the status of urban mobility and on the location of citizens, commuters and tourists, the system is able to reschedule in real time their movements. The service proposed stems from the state of the art in the field of travel planners for public transportation, available for Milan. Peculiarly, we built a representation of the city transit based on a time-expanded graph that considers the interconnections among all the stops of the rides offered during the day. The structure distinguishes the physical stations and the get on/get off stops of each ride, representing them with two different types of nodes. Such structure allows, with regard to the main focus of the project, to model a wide range of service disruptions, much more meaningful than those possible with approaches currently proposed by transit agencies. One of the most interesting point lies in the expressive capability in describing the different disruptions: with our model it is possible, for instance, to selectively inhibit getting on and/or off at a particular station, avoid specific rides, and model temporary deviations.