Multi-Modal Route Recommender System for Bangkok Public Transportation

Currently, Bangkok has a 151 kilometers service of a rail line, whereas the total plan is 540 kilometers. More rail lines are now under construction and supposed to be done by a few years. Regarding a massive public transportation network, we need a route recommender system to make traveling more efficient. This paper proposes the route recommender system which supports multi modes of transportation in Bangkok, including BTS, MRT, ARL, BMTA bus, and Chaophraya Riverboat. Users can see suggested routes and sort routes by travel time, fare, number of transfer, and overall score. The A* algorithm with the Haversine formula as the heuristic function is used to calculate the possible routes. Then the best route is selected based on the score, which is calculated form four factors: travel time, fare, number of transfer, and distance. The database contains 13,510 stops, and the results show that the system can suggest accurate routes within a few seconds, which is fast enough for all use cases and achieved overall user satisfaction at 84.8% from our user experience survey.

A Multi-Modal Route Choice Model with Ridesharing and Public Transit

With the extensive use of smart-phone applications and online payment systems, more travelers choose to participate in ridesharing activities. In this paper, a multi-modal route choice model is proposed by incorporating ridesharing and public transit in a single-origin-destination (OD)-pair network. Due to the presence of ridesharing, travelers not only choose routes (including main road and side road), but also decide travel modes (including solo driver, ridesharing driver, ridesharing passenger, and transit passenger) to minimize travelers’ generalized travel cost (not their actual travel cost due to the existence of car capacity constraints). The proposed model is expressed as an equivalent complementarity problem. Finally, the impacts of key factors on ridesharing behavior in numerical examples are discussed. The equilibrium results show that passengers’ rewards and toll charge of solo drivers on main road significantly affect the travelers’ route and mode choice behavior, and an increase of passengers’ rewards (toll) motivates (forces) more travelers to take environmentally friendly travel modes.

Incorporating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Freight Transportation Infrastructure Project Evaluation

Transportation industry at large is a major consumer of fossil fuels and contributes heavily to the global greenhouse gas emissions. A significant portion of these emissions come from freight transportation and decisions on mode/route may affect the overall scale of emissions from a specific movement. It is common to consider several alternatives for a new freight activity and compare the alternatives from economic perspective. However, there is a growing emphasis for adding emissions to this evaluation process. One of the approaches to do this is through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); a method for estimating the emissions, energy consumption and environmental impacts of the project throughout its life cycle. Since modal/route selections are often investigated early in the planning stage of the project, availability of data and resources for analysis may become a challenge for completing a detailed LCA on alternatives. This research builds on such detailed LCA comparison performed on a previous case study by Kalluri et al. (2016), but it also investigates whether a simplified LCA process that only includes emissions from operations phase could be used as a less resource intensive option for the analysis while still providing relevant outcomes. The detailed LCA is performed using SimaPro software and simplified LCA is performed using GREET 2016 model. The results are obtained in terms of Kg CO2 equivalents of GHG emissions. This paper introduces both detailed and simplified methodologies and applies them to a case study of a nickel and copper mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The analysis’ are done for three modal alternatives (two truck routes and one rail route) and for multiple mine lives.