From Data to Routes: A Comprehensive Approach to Public Transport Line Routing

Modern public transport is an integral part of Smart Cities. Every day, millions of travellers use information about the current state of transport systems to plan their journeys. As the number of smart devices in these systems grows, so does the ability to provide more detailed information. These more detailed types of data also include geographically accurate routes of lines, and typically transport companies or coordinating authorities reach for solutions from the routing domain to obtain this type of data. This also includes the Integrated Transport System of the South Moravian Region (IDS JMK), where the need to complement the information provided to passengers with the geographically precise line routes has become apparent. However, the suitable data, which allows direct use of routing in this transport system, including the second largest city in the Czech Republic, did not exist. Thus, the purpose of this paper was to verify whether it is possible, with the help of preprocessing and subsequent data augmentation, to obtain geographically accurate line routes even from data sources that were not originally intended for this purpose. As a result, a state machine has been designed which, with the selected and implemented routing algorithm, allows to determine the exact structure of individual lines. Obtaining the exact structure of individual lines then enables the generation of geographically accurate routes, which was tested within the implementation of the proposed solution in cooperation with the coordinating authority for the IDS JMK, the Kordis company.