Transport Problems (Dec 2015)
ersonal smart travel agent for empowering persons with disabilities using public transport
Abstract
Today's public transport is not easy to use by people having mental problems or those who are disabled. Traffic planning today is powered by online time tables calculating the optimal way to use public transport in terms of time and costs. Therefore usually a graph representing the public transport network is set up and algorithms taken from graph theory or operations research are used to find optimal routes. This is not suitable for a group of travellers having constraints in using vehicles, vehicle types or particular stations for health reasons. On the other hand, since most of those people are not able to drive a car on their own, making public transport available and moreover easily usable enable these people to improve their mobility and their quality of life in general. This paper shows an approach developed within the mobile project funded by The German Federal Ministry of economy and energy that allows supporting this group of users during a travel using public transport and undertaking personal constraints in route planning. This allows getting personalized advice during travel and while travel planning. This is implemented by generation of a second graph representing the public transport network not in dimension of time and costs but in preferences and dislike of a given traveller. The second graph is an overlay to the standard graph to get a personalized graph that allows finding a suitable route respecting the constraints of the user.
