Which quality is a route? A methodology for assessing route quality using spatio-temporal metrics

In the context of intelligent transport systems, dynamic route planning is an eagerly researched topic. While the research community during the last decade has focused on performance and scalability of dynamic route planning algorithms, the question concerning route qualities has been widely neglected. The current work contributes to this question by proposing a methodology to assess the quality of arbitrary routes based on seven spatio-temporal route quality metrics (five spatial and two temporal ones). The methodology is evaluated by calculating quality metrics for 45 routes being derived from three dynamic route planning systems for three selected origin-destination pairs during one day. For objectively assessing route qualities, the approach matches the route planning results to a reference digital road network and uses reference travel times for calculating quality metrics. A spatio-temporal cross-evaluation illustrates different quality aspects in the context of both quality dimensions and demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach.