Routing over large (public and private) transport networks across Europe: challenges and opportunities

Martina Fischetti and Juan Nicolás Ibáñez (European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (EC-JRC))

A well-functioning transport system is not only critical to European businesses and global supply
chains, and as a rather important economic activity, contributing in the European Union (EU) to
around 5% of GDP and more than 10 million jobs, but also critical to guarantee that European
citizens have access to essential services such as education, healthcare, or employment. This
compounds with the fact that the transport system is relatively hard to decarbonise, and a sector
that brings many external costs to the society (GHG and pollutant emissions, noise, road crashes and
congestion). Against this context, the transport sector plays a key role in one of the main EU policy
priorities under the European Green Deal, the achievement of climate neutrality by 2050.
The EU mandate includes the monitoring across all Member States of the deployment and the
evaluation of the performance of both public and private transport infrastructure. This is used to
inform relevant policy initiatives on issues such as guaranteeing a level playing field for competition
across transport modes or identifying where funding is most needed to ensure access to an
affordable and sustainable transport system.
In this talk we will present details of different lines of work in the European Commission’s Joint
Research Centre (EC-JRC) to support the abovementioned mandate, providing an overview of some
of the transport-related modelling challenges faced and some of possible solution methods
proposed. More elaboration will be provided on methodologies developed by the EC-JRC that focus
on employing comprehensive (EU-wide) data to compute performance and access-to-opportunities
metrics associated with different modes transport, underlining the network (graph building and
routing) challenges addressed to compute these metrics with a sufficiently high level of spatial detail
for the scale of interest (EU-wide).
The discussion will refer to methodologies that exploit routing over large transport networks, for
both private (road) and public (railways, buses, etc.) means of transport. On the latter we will
present results from an ongoing collaboration with the Department of Mathematics of the University
of Pavia on an implementation of an innovative method for fast computation of all-to-all routing
over large schedule-based network graphs.