The Effectiveness of Travel Information Based on Information Entropy and Transmission Index

For a certain trip purpose, travelers need to make their optimal scheduling, namely constitute their optimal planning, and choose departure time, route, trip mode and transfer site, etc. One of the major criteria for decision-making is the relevant travel information obtained, such as cost, traffic condition, transfer information and services, etc. The information for traveler decision-making is defined based on travelers' demand, and then it is analyzed according to trip modes in detail. A new travel information transmission model is proposed based on the information theory. And the obtained travel information of travelers is quantified using information entropy. Also a case of evaluation of the quality of travel information transmission is presented according to surveys data from Chengdu. At the same time, a transmission index model is proposed to evaluate the travel information transmission quality of a trip mode (or a transport enterprise). The index coefficients are determined based on fuzzy mathematics. The application indicates the effectiveness of information entropy method to evaluate the design quality of travel information transmission mode. These methods should be applied synthetically to evaluate the overall level of travel information transmission. Furthermore it offers some good evaluation means for ATIS.