A Survey on Transit Map Layout -- from Design, Machine, and Human

This web page is prepared for providing research materials of our Survey on Transit Map Layout.

Abstract

Transit maps are diagrams designed to present information for using public transportation systems, such as urban railway networks. Creating a transit map is a time-consuming process, which requires iterative information selection, layout design, and usability validation, and thus maps cannot easily be customised or updated frequently. To improve this, scientists investigate fully or semi-automatic techniques in order to produce high quality transit maps using computers and further examine their corresponding usability. Nonetheless, the quality gap between manually-drawn maps and machine-generated maps is still large. To elaborate the current research status, this state-of-the-art report provides an overview of the transit map generation process, primarily from Design, Machine, and Human perspectives. A systematic categorisation is introduced to describe the design pipeline, and an extensive analysis of perspectives is conducted to support the proposed taxonomy. We conclude this survey with a discussion on the current research status, open challenges, and future directions.

Paper & Materials

Hsiang-Yun Wu, Benjamin Niedermann, Shigeo Takahashi, Maxwell J. Roberts, and Martin Nöllenburg. A Survey on Transit Map Layout -- from Design, Machine, and Human Perspectives, Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EuroVis 2020 - STAR Track), Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 619-646, 2020. Paper-preprint (PDF, 13.2MB), Table data (XLSX, 66KB)