IDENTIFYING UNIQUE ROUTES IN TRANSPORTATION NETWORKS
Laurence R. Rilett, Dong-Joo Park · Intelligent Transportation: Realizing the Future. Abstracts of the Third World Congress on Intelligent Transport SystemsITS America · 1996
One of the fundamental assumptions of traveler information systems is that each driver has a number of alternative routes she may choose for the journey to her destination. While this concept is intuitively obvious, the number and nature of these alternative routes has received little study. With the advent of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and real-time route selection capabilities such as those demonstrated in the TravTek project, it is important that the basis of realistic alternative routes be studied. The objective of this paper is to identify i) the number of realistic routes available to drivers between a given origin and destination, and ii) whether this knowledge can be used in the route calculation/selection process. This paper reports on a study undertaken to examine the relationship between the number of routes between a given origin-destination pair and the definition of a route. The paper first examines various definitions of a route and develops some preliminary criteria for distinguishing a unique route. Subsequently, an empirical analysis is performed using a network from Bryan/College Station, Texas as a test bed. Lastly, the potential applications for this methodology within transportation modeling and ITS are briefly discussed.