An interactive decision support system for the design of rapid public transit networks

This article describes a visual interactive decision support system for the simultaneous location of several rapid transit lines in a city. Three types of tool are available to the user: parameter setting, menu choices, and mouse operations. The system produces network configurations of the type selected by the user and computes a number of effectiveness measures. The system has been tested on real data from the city of Milan, Italy. It can consistently produce several interesting alternative solutions within short computing times.