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A Multimodal Framework for Transport Planning

Authors Lena Dittrich , Michael Rihlmann , Philine Schiewe , Anita Schöbel

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Applied computing → Operations research
  • Applied computing → Transportation
  • Mathematics of computing → Mathematical optimization
  • Software and its engineering → Software libraries and repositories
Keywords
  • multimodal planning
  • line planning
  • timetabling

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Abstract

Planning high-quality public transport systems requires taking multiple modalities of transportation into account simultaneously. This includes public transport such as trains or buses, but also ridepooling, walking or biking. While planning of public transport lines and timetables has been studied extensively for unimodal systems, research on settings which include more than one modality is just at its beginning. In this paper, we categorize the modalities as line-based, ridepooling, and nonscheduled for which we develop a framework for multimodal planning. This can be applied for different line-based modalities, e.g., for planning bus and tram lines simultaneously, but also for modalities from different categories, e.g., for planning ridepooling together with bus lines while taking footpaths into account. Technically, we extend classic graph structures from unimodal public transport optimization to the multimodal case and show how established solution methods for the unimodal case carry over to the multimodal setting. In particular, we formulate multimodal line planning and periodic timetabling problems. We demonstrate the practical applicability of the framework through a case study on real-world data from Helsinki, Finland, considering five line-based modalities and walking. Our experiments show that incorporating multimodal aspects into the planning process consistently reduces average passenger travel time.

Cite As Get BibTex

Lena Dittrich, Michael Rihlmann, Philine Schiewe, and Anita Schöbel. A Multimodal Framework for Transport Planning. In 26th Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 147, pp. 12:1-12:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ATMOS.2026.12

Author Details

Lena Dittrich
  • Department of Mathematics, RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany
Michael Rihlmann
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Philine Schiewe
  • Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, Aalto University, Finland
Anita Schöbel
  • Department of Mathematics, RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM, Kaiserslautern, Germany

Funding

  • Dittrich, Lena: Funded by BMBF Project number 05M22UKB (SynphOnie).
  • Schiewe, Philine: This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland (Flagship of Advanced Mathematics for Sensing Imaging and Modelling 359181).

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Olli Herrala for implementing multimodal timetabling methods and generating the Helsinki dataset. We also want to thank Prof. Dr.-Ing. Markus Friedrich and Julian Zimmer from Institut für Straßen- und Verkehrswesen at University of Stuttgart for providing us with estimations for realistic input parameters of our models.

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