cs.AIJul 5, 2026

LegalFarePlan: A Label-Setting Framework for Fare-Transparent Urban Rail Route Planning under Non-Additive Fare Rules

Authors: Tanghui Li

Organizations: Tongji University · Shanghai, China

Abstract

Urban rail fare systems may be non-additive: the fare of a single paid journey from an origin to a destination can differ from the sum of fares over multiple legally separated journey legs. This paper presents LegalFarePlan, a fare-transparent route-planning framework that models legal exit-and-reentry operations as explicit, auditable constraints. Given a transit network, fare function, transfer rules, station-level exit/re-entry costs, an extra-time budget, and a split limit, the planner computes explainable route plans over paid journey segments. The artifact implements Dijkstra shortest-time and direct route-planner baselines, a greedy split heuristic, bounded exact label-setting, and Pareto-frontier search. Evaluation uses controlled synthetic data and a 57-station semi-synthetic benchmark with 360 OD pairs. On the semi-synthetic benchmark, bounded exact search identifies positive modeled fare reductions for 71.11% of OD pairs, with mean reduction 3.78 and maximum reduction 9.0 synthetic fare units under a 45-minute extra-time budget. These results demonstrate method behavior and reproducibility; they are not empirical conclusions about MTR or any transit operator.

Explore similar work

May 21, 2026cs.CL

TransitLM: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Map-Free Transit Route Generation

Public transit route planning traditionally depends on structured map infrastructure and complex routing engines, and no existing dataset supports training models to bypass this dependency. We present TransitLM, a large-scale dataset of over 13 million transit route planning records from four Chinese cities covering 120,845 stations and 13,666 lines, released as a continual pre-training corpus and benchmark data for three evaluation tasks with complementary metrics. Experiments show that an LLM trained on TransitLM produces structurally valid routes at high accuracy and implicitly grounds arbitrary GPS coordinates to appropriate stations without any explicit mapping. These results demonstrate that transit route planning can be learned entirely from data, enabling end-to-end, map-free route generation directly from origin-destination information. The dataset and benchmark are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/GD-ML/TransitLM, with evaluation code at https://github.com/HotTricker/TransitLM.
Hanyu Guo, Jiedong Yang, Chao Chen +3
May 27, 2026cs.AI

AlphaTransit: Learning to Design City-scale Transit Routes

Designing a transit network requires many sequential route extension decisions, but their quality is often visible only after the full network is assembled. This delayed-feedback challenge lies at the heart of the Transit Route Network Design Problem (TRNDP), where route interactions can be deceptive: an extension that appears useful locally can create transfer bottlenecks, produce redundant overlap, or reduce overall throughput. To guide route construction under delayed simulator feedback, we introduce AlphaTransit, a search-based planning framework for cityscale bus network design. AlphaTransit couples Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a neural policy-value network: the policy proposes route extensions, the value estimates downstream design quality, and search uses these predictions to refine each decision. This provides decision-time lookahead during route construction without running simulator rollouts inside the search tree. We evaluate AlphaTransit on a new Bloomington TRNDP benchmark with realistic road topology and censusderived demand, under mixed and full transit demand settings. In the Bloomington network, AlphaTransit attains the highest service rate in both demand settings, reaching 54.6% and 82.1%, respectively. Relative to reinforcement learning without search, these correspond to 9.9% and 11.4% service rate gains; relative to MCTS without learned guidance, they correspond to 2.5% and 11.2% gains. These results suggest that coupling learned guidance with MCTS is more effective than using either approach alone for transit network design. Our code and data are publicly available in https://github.com/poudel-bibek/AlphaTransit.
Bibek Poudel, Sai Swaminathan, Weizi Li
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

From Feasibility to Desirability: Plan, Learn, Adapt (PLA) Framework for Personalized On-Device Itinerary Generation

Generating personalized trip itineraries is a complex planning task and involves a tension between hard combinatorial feasibility and soft latent desirability. Classical optimization enforces constraints but fails to capture subjective traveler preferences. While learning-based approaches model preferences, they cannot guarantee feasibility. Mobile deployment imposes additional resource constraints on both. To address this, we propose Plan, Learn, Adapt (PLA), a three-stage framework for personalized on-device itinerary generation. The Plan stage builds a heterogeneous ensemble of lightweight planners that produces structurally diverse feasible candidates. From pairwise itinerary comparisons, Learn fits a compact Bradley-Terry reward model that captures emergent schedule properties such as pacing, geographic coherence, and day balance, which per-POI signals miss. Finally, Adapt applies feasibility-preserving local refinement within a device-aware compute budget; every intermediate state is feasible by construction. On 2,519 pairwise human comparisons across more than 100 U.S. cities, the reward-guided ensemble achieves a 67.8% win rate, 11.2 percentage points above the best single planner, with 100% feasibility. Three frontier LLMs, GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro, achieve 0% feasibility under the same constraints. The reward model generalizes across held-out cities, with a 67.6% mean leave-one-city-out accuracy. In production deployment within FlyEnJoy, PLA increased itinerary completion rates by 91%, with 109.9 ms average on-device latency.
Himel Dev, Tanmoy Sen, Madhusudan Basak +1