Design Team Members: Kevin Kim and Michelle Kim
Supervisor: Professor P.H. Calamai
Background
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, between 1982 and 2002, the distance a vehicle travels increased by 79 percent. During the same period of time, the number of congested roadways grew from 34 percent to 58 percent. Most of us probably have had frustrating experiences of traffic congestions at least once in our lives. This encourages us to use public transit services such as subways, buses, trains and streetcars. However, it requires more planning than simply driving our own vehicles. We need to know the location of stops, schedules, necessary transfers, and total estimated time. Our team considered different preferences of public transit users, and designed a web-based tool that generates an optimal travel route as per user’s request.
Project description
Public transit users will be able to access the Optimal Bus Route Planner from the city transit website. Users need to enter the origin and destination addresses, and date of travel. They also need to specify either their desired departure time or the arrival time. Lastly, users select their preferences on how they want to sort out the results: by minimum walking distance, minimum number of transfers or minimum travel time. With users’ inputs, the Optimal Bus Route Planner creates the optimal bus route. It provides a detailed instruction, a visual map, estimated total travel time and walking time, and number of transfers.
Design methodology
The Optimal Bus Route Planner is designed using the three-tier architecture. On the client-server, JavaScript is used while PHP is used on the back-end. For the database, MySQL is used. MySQL works with PHP to display geographical data in Google Maps. Three different algorithms are developed for each user preferences: minimum walking distance, number of transfers, and travel time. For each algorithm, shortest path graph theory was used.