Multimodal route and tour planning in urban environments

The environmental impact of the steadily increasing demand for mobility of people and goods, especially in urban environments, raises public concern and presents challenges that need to be addressed in the interest of long-term sustainability. Along this line, the inherently eco-friendly human mobility which involves the use of urban public transit networks must be encouraged and eased. This necessitates the development of context-aware services that hide the complexity of public transit networks while considering all available transportation modalities (e.g. bus, metro, tram, walking and cycling) in order to provide sophisticated route planning tailored to both residents and visitors of urban areas. The EU-funded eCOMPASS research project has addressed this challenge through establishing a methodological framework for route planning optimization. A core objective of the project has been to employ novel algorithm engineering approaches for delivering a comprehensive set of tools and services (accessible from web/mobile application interfaces) for mobile end users to enable eco-awareness in urban multi-modal transfers. eCOMPASS delivered web and mobile services providing multimodal public transportation route planning, considering contextual information as well as various restrictions and/or user constraints. Herein, we report the motivation, main scientific innovations and present the end-products of eCOMPASS with respect to multimodal human mobility.