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

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 39; no. 3; pp. 619 - 646
• Main Authors: Wu, Hsiang‐Yun, Niedermann, Benjamin, Takahashi, Shigeo, Roberts, Maxwell J., Nöllenburg, Martin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2020; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: CCS Concepts; Human‐centered computing → Visualization techniques; Iterative methods; Layouts; Pipeline design; Public transportation; Quality management; Taxonomy; Transportation planning; Transportation systems; Usability; Visualization design and evaluation methods
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.14030

Transit maps are designed to present information for using public transportation systems, such as urban railways. 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.