An Algorithm to Generate a Simplified Railway Network through Generalization

Abstract

don Tube. Since this type of map lacks a lot of additional cartographic information, it has become also common to show the geometry of the route as an overlay on a real map, so that the user is able to locate stations and the travelled route in between. A dynamic enhancement of this type of map is the so called Live Map, where, in addition to the tracks, the positions of the moving vehicles are drawn in real-time. The position information can be gathered either directly from GPS or indirectly calculated through spatiotemporal interpolation on the given track, like it can be seen for example at the German “DB Zugradar”, www.bahn.de/zugradar (Fig. 1). A basic requirement for the routing of the trains is a graph structure of the track network.