Optimal route planning for stochastic time-dependent hitchhiker’s problem

ABSTRACT Hitchhiking is a travel mode characterised by unpredictable travel times involving several possible combinations of lifts on roads. In this paper, we formulate a hitchhiker’s problem and develop a time-dependent stochastic route planning algorithm for hitchhikers. Namely, we introduce a concept of the stochastic time-dependent hitchhiking graph to find hitchhiking strategies with the least expected travel time or maximised reliability. We introduce various heuristics to prune the original hitchhiking graph to improve computational efficiency. We provide a complexity analysis of the problem and evaluate the proposed solution on real-world networks of several countries.