Developing an Object-Oriented Testbed for Modeling Transportation Networks

The objective of the paper is to discuss the development of an alternative representation of the transportation network using object-oriented GIS. This representation is important for the supply side of transportation planning and modeling. Object-orientation provides a way of solving the problem in a planar network for routing. It can facilitate the calculation of detailed network characteristics using properties such as inheritance and polymorphism. This representation is also closer to human perception of a transportation network. It is argued that by using an object-oriented GIS we can facilitate path selection using different criteria. We experiment with the design of the object-oriented system by developing an object-oriented representation of a transportation network and incorporating different path selection algorithms based on various behavioral assumptions. It is especially useful in the design for a versatile ATIS.