Efficient Public Transport Planning on Roads

Public transport contributes significantly to addressing some city issues such as air pollution and traffic congestion. As the public transport demand changes in urban development, we need to plan new routes to match the demand. Existing methods of planning new bus routes either are inefficient in using the path’s cost or use other inaccurate cost measurements. This paper focuses on finding a new bus route efficiently on road networks. Specifically, we first propose the Bus Routing on Roads (BRR) problem which combines two common goals of minimizing the walking costs of passengers and maximizing the connectivity of the new route to the existing transit network. They are consistent with matching the demand and facilitating the transfer. We first show the NP-hardness of the BRR and design an approximation algorithm called Efficient Bus Routing on Roads (EBRR). We theoretically analyzed its approximation ratio and time complexity. Extensive evaluations with state-of-the-art solutions on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of EBRR. It could recommend a new bus route with high quality in around 10 seconds, 60x faster than the baselines.