Design and Implementation Issues of a Time-dependent Shortest Path Algorithm for Multimodal Transportation Network

In recent years the structure of transportation networks has become more complex as a result of the fast development of the social and economical infrastructure. When dealing with time dependent multimodal context, transport planning represents a fundamental problem and more specifically for hazardous materials. Several approaches have been proposed that strive to reduce the financial costs, travel time and vehicle operating costs. Our work tends to focus on potential improvements related to resolve the shortest path problem. This paper handles the design and implementation issues of our monolithic approach solving the time dependent multimodal transportation problem aimed at calculating the shortest path from a source node to a destination node. The algorithm on which relies our approach is target oriented and focuses basically on the reduction of the search space by considering a virtual path from the source to the destination as well as a user defined constraint defining a dynamically extendable corridor-like restricted search zone that can be applied on either the Euclidian distance or the travel cost function . The specification details of the algorithm have been already presented in our previous work and will be out the scope of this paper. Especially, this work highlights the aspects related to the different dimensions of the search space, namely the time, the mode and the constraint parameter.