Arc-Flags Meet Trip-Based Public Transit Routing

Abstract: We present Arc-Flag TB, a journey planning algorithm for public transit networks which combines Trip-Based Public Transit Routing (TB) with the Arc-Flags speedup technique. Compared to previous attempts to apply Arc-Flags to public transit networks, which saw limited success, our approach uses stronger pruning rules to reduce the search space. Our experiments show that Arc-Flag TB achieves a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude over TB, offering query times of less than a millisecond even on large countrywide networks. Compared to the state-of-the-art speedup technique Trip-Based Public Transit Routing Using Condensed Search Trees (TB-CST), our algorithm achieves similar query times but requires significantly less additional memory. Other state-of-the-art algorithms which achieve even faster query times, e.g., Public Transit Labeling, require enormous memory usage. In contrast, Arc-Flag TB offers a tradeoff between query performance and memory usage due to the fact that the number of regions in the network partition required by our algorithm is a configurable parameter. We also identify an issue in the transfer precomputation of TB that affects both TB-CST and Arc-Flag TB, leading to incorrect answers for some queries. This has not been previously recognized by the author of TB-CST. We provide discussion on how to resolve this issue in the future. Currently, Arc-Flag TB answers 1-6% of queries incorrectly, compared to over 20% for TB-CST on some networks.