A Road Timetable™ to aid vehicle routing and scheduling

Both within and between urban conurbations, the time of a journey and the corresponding shortest path in a road network from an origin to a destination may depend on the time of the day, the day of the week and the season of the year. Significant journey time differences occur mainly due to recurring instances and variations in levels of traffic congestion throughout the year. This paper examines the issues involved in constructing a database of road times for a road network that uses time-dependent data on the travel times for individual roads in the network to provide the expected times and distances between locations for journeys starting at different times. The benefits of time-dependent vehicle routing and scheduling systems are demonstrated by using real-world data for the road network in the north west of England.