Given
- a source location and a destination location, and
- an acceptable range of departure times, or an acceptable range of arrival times, and
- a schedule of available bus routes (e.g. http://www.tcatbus.com/ride/),
you would like to take bus(es) to go from the source to the destination, either start within the range of departure times, or arrive within the range of arrival times.
Mathematically, how do you plan a trip, and list two or three optional plans according to their travel time lengths?
It is an optimization problem. Can we model it as a graph optimization problem, a dynamic programming problem, or ..., so that we can solve it using algorithms for the specific optimization problems?
For example, there is a trip planner (http://tcat.nextinsight.com/), and ways to implement such a trip planner is what I am interested in.
- On the other hand, empirically, how does an intelligent human (who hasn't learn mathematical optimization) make a trip plan? You may use some tools that are available at http://www.tcatbus.com/ride/, such as you can look up the schedule (stops and times) of a specific route, and you can also look up which routes stop at a specific stop and when.
Thanks.