Colored-Edge Graph Approach for the Modeling of Multimodal Transportation Systems

Many networked systems involve multiple modes of transport. Such systems are called multimodal, and examples include logistic networks, biomedical phenomena and telecommunication networks. Existing techniques for determining minimal paths in multimodal networks have either required heuristics or else application-specific constraints to obtain tractable problems, removing the multimodal traits of the network during analysis. In this paper weighted colored-edge graphs are introduced for modeling multimodal networks, where colors represent the modes of transportation. Minimal paths are selected using a partial order that compares the weights in each color, resulting in a Pareto set of minimal paths. Although the computation of minimal paths is theoretically intractable and 𝒩𝒫-complete, the approach is shown to be tractable through experimental analyses without the need to apply heuristics or constraints.