Grouping of Optimized Pedestrian Routes for Multi-Modal Route Planning: A Comparison of Two Cities

The purpose of multi-modal route planners is to provide the user with the optimal route between trip start and destination, where the route may utilize several transportation modes including public transportation. The optimal route is defined over a set of evaluation criteria considered by the user during the route selection process. Especially in the case of multi-modal transportation, numerous evaluation criteria play a role in the traveler’s route choice. Thus the number of requested search parameters in the route planner may be large, and the user interface is overcrowded easily. Based on a set of pedestrian routes that are optimized for various criteria in multi-modal, inner-urban transportation networks of two European cities, an exploratory study based on Principal Components Analysis (PCA) identifies underlying factors that capture the correlations among route selection criteria. The results show how the variability of routes can be parsimoniously described with a smaller set of components, and how these findings can be used to simplify the user interface design of multi-modal route planners.