PLOTS : pattern language of transport systems – Point and Route Patterns –

A point in a transport network plays many roles. The Point pattern provides a flexible structure that decouples a point's role from the point itself and supports multiple concurrent roles. Points (or the links between points) are used to define routes. A route is a path through an ordered sequence of points (or links) in a transport network. A route may build upon different layers of components. The Route pattern provides a consistent tree structure for layering and ordering the route components. Route can cope with many variations in defining routes and allows clients to treat all objects used for route definition uniformly. Point and Route are patterns in PLOTS, a pattern language for building transport systems. This paper shows how Point and Route provide a design solution for describing the spatial structure of a transport network, and how they interact with other patterns in PLOTS.