Generalised time-dependent graphs for fully multimodal journey planning

We solve the fully multimodal journey planning problem, in which journey plans can employ any combination of scheduled public transport (e.g., bus, tram and underground), individual (e.g., walk, bike, shared bike and car), and on-demand (e.g., taxi) transport modes. Our solution is based on a generalised time-dependent graph that allows representing the fully multimodal earliest arrival problem as a standard graph search problem and consequently using general shortest path algorithms to solve it. In addition, to allow users to express their journey planning preferences and to speed up the search process, flexible journey plan templates can be used in our approach to restrict the transport modes and mode combinations permitted in generated journey plans. We have evaluated our solution on a real-world transport network of the city of Helsinki and achieved practically usable search runtimes in the range of hundreds of milliseconds.