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

Abstract

Transit maps are designed to present information for using public transportation systems, such as urban railways. Creating atransit 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-automatictechniques 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 currentresearch 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 extensiveanalysis of perspectives is conducted to support the proposed taxonomy. We conclude this survey with a discussion on thecurrent research status, open challenges, and future directions.