Daily Activity and Multimodal Travel Planner: Phase II

Findings

Movement is restricted by the available time and the travel speed of an individual. By developing efficient travel itineraries, the traveler can optimally visit multiple locations with minimal waste. This project sought to develop an information system and a software product known as the "Itinerary Planner" that can assist travelers in optimizing an itinerary that may include visits to multiple locations and that may use multiple modes.

The Itinerary Planner utilizes both highway and transit databases and accounts for user preferences and constraints as it interactively builds an itinerary comprised of a set of sequenced activity locations to visit and trips which connect these locations. The Itinerary Planner considers trip attributes, such as travel time, travel cost, and waiting time and weighs the various attributes according to user preferences input by the user. Often, an itinerary that is optimal in all attributes does not exist, so the consideration of user preferences (for example, time over cost) is important.

The Itinerary Planner prototype was developed for San Francisco, and makes use of the multiple available modes of travel found in the San Francisco area: travel time by taxi, travel time by transit, travel time by cable car, travel cost, walk time, number of transfers, and waiting time. User considerations related to these modes are also considered in the software, for example, whether the user can or is willing to walk a given distance.

The prototype is developed as a public-access terminal. The beginning of each itinerary is therefore the location of the terminal. The terminal provides the user with a visual display of the itinerary with different colors used to indicate different modes. The terminal also provides the user with written directions, including which mode to take where and how long each trip segment is expected to take.

This project primarily sought to develop the Itinerary Planner prototype. The software is still in the prototype stages and though it provided very promising results, it has not been extensively tested.