Traveltime on ferry / combined transport

[Bernd Welter]

Hi there,

a partner asked me how we determine the travel time on ferries in xRoute2's routing. We compared some well known connections and this triggered some questions:

We searched for ferries leaving from DUBLIN harbour. There are two equally labelled ferries towards Holyhead. The partner knows them from his own experience: one of them is a slo one (4 hours) while the other one is some speed boat (2 hours).
In this screenshot both ferries have been enforced via "combined transport waypoint" - we seem to calculate them both with the same traveltime (4:40) and speed (0). Though there's a small difference in the two polylines (different, but close by terminals in Dublin) this doesn't seem to be correct

• Could you give us some more details about how PTV estimated the travel times?
• How does PTV determine whether the ferry is able to handle specific vehicles such as cars, large trucks, ...?

Bernd

[Bernd Welter]

Here's some feedback from DEV (Frank) and DATA (Thorsten):

• Data perspective: ferry segments have a distance in the map data. We use the distance to compute a traveltime with an average speed of 25km/h plus 10 minutes per harbour.
• From the engine perspective the routing just gathers vehicle types (allowed for cars, trucks) and the traveltime from the map data. Distances on ferries are ignored because they won't appear on the vehicle's tachograph.

Thanks, guys!

Bernd

PS: attention - this approach is just a rough approximation !
Application at your own risk !

[Bernd Welter]

I implemented a sample for this calculation. For the channel tunnel the distance calculated via this approach is about 28.625 km.
Looks good to me!

Code: Select all

public double getTraveltime()
{
    return exitEvent.travelTimeFromStart - enterEvent.travelTimeFromStart;
}
public double getDistance()
{
    double deltaTraveltime = getTraveltime();
    // (10 minutes per harbour)
    // (deltaTraveltime * 25 km/h)
    return (deltaTraveltime -20.0*60.0) * (25000.0 / 3600.0);
}