The LIINES is happy to announce that The IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems has accepted our recent paper entitled: An Axiomatic Design Approach to Passenger Itinerary Enumeration in Reconfigurable Transportation Systems for publication. The paper is authored by Dr. Asha Viswanath, Edgar Eugenio Samano Baca and Prof. Amro M. Farid.
The topic of path enumeration in a transportation network has a long history. As one can easily imagine, we have been asking: “How many different ways can I get from here to there?” for a very long time. The question is fundamental to many operations research problems and has new applications in the resilience of infrastructure systems. So why a new approach to such an old problem?
Well, as the paper explains, the traditional graph theoretic based method lacks in four ways:
- it does not explicitly describe the different potentially redundant modes of transport.
- it does not explicitly address the implicit functions of parking, loading/unloading, or sitting at an intersection. Naturally, if these “null-processes” were somehow unavailable you might be stuck along your path for a very long time.
- given its highly abstracted nature, traditional graph theoretic methods do not integrate well with existing engineering design methodologies.
- it does not explicitly describe changes or reconfigurations to the transportation network structure in real-time and hence has limited application to the design of real-time reconfigurable transportation systems.
Instead, this paper presents a passenger itinerary enumeration approach based upon Prof. Nam Suh’s axiomatic design theory for large flexible systems. Here, the system form and function are both explicitly described to overcome all of the weaknesses mentioned above. The work has immediate relevance to transportation systems that require real-time switching decisions in their network structure. Furthermore, many transportation system life cycle properties functionally depend on path enumeration.
Further applications of this work can already be found on the LIINES publication page: http://liines.net
LIINES Website: http://liines.net
