Design and implementation of a distributed Web-based system for itinerary planning in uncertain urban multimodal network

Today’s traffic is one of the main concerns of urban managers. One of the solutions that have been proposed to reduce traffic is encourage people to use public transport instead of personal vehicles, so the quality of public transport should be increased. One way promoting public transport systems quality is creating urban traveler guidance system. In other hand, public transportation network is large and complex, also urban transportation data often is distributed and heterogeneous. In addition to, the travel route choice criteria are imprecise and uncertain. So having such characteristics, cause modeling, design and implementation of systems that can help travelers to choose their appropriate route are going to be more and more complex and difficult. We designed and implemented a travel information system for city of Tehran and named it as “TIPS”. So in this article, we illustrate the overall process of design and implementation of TIPS. The designed system will be able to acquire and combine heterogeneous data sources that are located in different places (bus, taxi and metro Inc and ...). The gathered data will be imported in a web processing service using the OGC WFS standard. Designed WPS will be able to model the multimodal network using graph theory and it also will be able to consider available uncertainty or defects in urban traveler information such as routes, stations, and travel information. In this WPS, the modeling of uncertainty are performed using fuzzy set theory. The final outputs of designed system are several ranked optimal paths between user’s selected origin and destination. The result of these study shows that the designed system in comparison with other similar designed systems is a more optimal performance and results provided by it are closer to reality.