Abstract

The most convenient route to connect two locations is often a mix of different transportation systems. For instance, a user can make intercity trips by selecting a combination of transport modes such as car, rail, ship or airplane. In this casethe transportation system is said to be multimodal. In this paper, real multimodal transportation systems are experimentally analyzed. Real road–rail networks from Denmark, Hungary, Spain, Norway and New Zealand are built based on a set of digitized transportation maps obtained from several GIS libraries. These networksare modelled as coloured–edge graphs to be used as main input by a multimodal Dijkstra’s algorithm that computes a set of optimal paths. The cardinality of the resulting set is at the core of the approach tractability. It is concluded that vertices connectivity and network shape considerably affect the total number of optimal paths.