UnLimited TRAnsfers for Multi-Modal Route Planning: An Efficient Solution

We study a multimodal journey planning scenario consisting of a public transit network and a transfer graph which represents a secondary transportation mode (e.g., walking, cycling, e-scooter). The objective is to compute Pareto-optimal journeys with respect to arrival time and the number of used public transit trips. While various existing algorithms can efficiently compute optimal journeys in either a pure public transit network or a pure transfer graph, combining the two increases running times significantly. Existing approaches therefore typically only support limited walking between stops, either by imposing a maximum transfer distance or by requiring the transfer graph to be transitively closed. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel preprocessing technique called ULTRA (UnLimited TRAnsfers): Given an unlimited transfer graph, which may represent any non-schedule-based transportation mode, ULTRA computes a small number of transfer shortcuts that are provably sufficient for computing a Pareto set of optimal journeys. These transfer shortcuts can be integrated into a variety of state-of-the-art public transit algorithms, establishing the ULTRA-Query algorithm family. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that ULTRA improves these algorithms from limited to unlimited transfers without sacrificing query speed. This is true not just for walking, but also for faster transfer modes such as bicycle or car. Compared to the state of the art for multimodal journey planning, the fastest ULTRA-based algorithm achieves a speedup of an order of magnitude.