Efficient monitoring of public transport journeys
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Efficient monitoring of public transport journeys Felix Gündling1 · Florian Hopp1 · Karsten Weihe1 Accepted: 18 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Many things can go wrong on a journey. From minor disturbances like a track change to major problems like train cancellations, everything can happen. The broad availability of smartphones enables us to keep the traveler up-to-date with information relevant for the journey. This way, the traveler can react to changes as early as possible and make well-informed decisions. Naive approaches are too inefficient to monitor a large number of journeys in real-time. This paper presents an efficient way to monitor millions of journeys in parallel. In our approach, the selection of change notices to be communicated to a traveler may be flexibly adapted to the travelers individual needs. Keywords Real-time · Public transport · Personalized · Connection monitoring
1 Introduction Every day, millions of travelers use public transportation to get to their destinations. Not all of those journeys run smoothly. Problems may be caused by delays, reroutings, cancellations, track changes, etc. If they occur, information is key to finding a solution. The earlier a problem is communicated by the transportation provider, the more options are available to the customer to react. With the advent of smartphones, it is now possible to inform the user as soon as new information about the situation becomes apparent. This imposes some constraints on the data processing: once a real-time update (e.g. a delay) is available, the system needs to determine the This work was partially supported by Deutsche Bahn AG. * Felix Gündling [email protected]‑darmstadt.de Florian Hopp [email protected]‑darmstadt.de Karsten Weihe [email protected]‑darmstadt.de 1
Technical University of Darmstadt, Hochschulstraße 10, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany
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affected journeys in a timely manner. Due to the large number of travelers, the realtime monitoring of all current and future (i.e. booked) journeys is a challenging task for the transportation provider. On the one hand, the customers always want to be up-to-date regarding the status of their journey. On the other hand, no one wants to annoy customers with journey updates they are not interested in: while some customers might be interested in a notice about an upcoming transfer, others only want to be bothered with essential information regarding the feasibility of the journey. Here, the remaining time until the corresponding event (e.g. the transfer in question) is important: a traveler is probably not interested in a predicted change in arrival time of 2 min when there are still 2 h left until the interchange. This would probably trigger many unnecessary alerts, since forecasts so far in the future are inherently inaccurate. Not only currently active journeys need to be monitored. Changes may also concern all future journeys already booked by customers. For example, a schedule change due to planned construction work may change the arriv
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