RouteMe: A Mobile Recommender System for Personalized, Multi-Modal Route Planning

Route planner systems support commuters and city visitors in finding the best route between two arbitrary points. More advanced route planners integrate different transportation modes such as private transport, public transport, car- and bicycle sharing or walking and are able combine these to multi-modal routes. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art planner systems usually do not consider the users' personal preferences or the wisdom of the crowd when suggesting multi-modal routes. Including the knowledge and experience of locals who are familiar with local transport allows identification of alternative routes which are, for example, less crowded during peak hours. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique that allows recommending items such as multi-modal routes based on the ratings of users with similar preferences. In this paper, we introduce RouteMe, a mobile recommender system for personalized, multi-modal routes which combines CF with knowledge-based recommendations to increase the quality of route recommendations. We present our hybrid algorithm in detail and show how we integrate it in a working prototype. The results of a user study show that our prototype combining CF, knowledge-based and popular route recommendations outperforms state-of-the-art route planners.