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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T21:15:08+00:00

[Not:e user is asking this again at Development of railway enquiry system, how to

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[Not:e user is asking this again at Development of railway enquiry system, how to model Trains, Stations and Stops? ]
My Problem Description:

Suppose I have a BUS-123 in ROUTE-1 it will travel through A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and BUS-321 in ROUTE-2 through D, E, F, X, Y, Z .
if someone enters B as a source point and F as a destination point then ROUTE-1 with BUS-123 should display in the result. But if someone enters H as a source and A as destination result should not display, because returning may not always same with one that is traveled.
But if a person enters A as a source and Z as destination then BUS-123 with ROUTE-1 and BUS-321 with ROUTE-2 should display.

My Problem is:
How do I store that route information in Database? if i store in RDBMS like the following

BUS_NUMBER   ROUTE_NUMBER    VIA_ROUTES
BUS-123      ROUTE-1         A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H
BUS-321      ROUTE-2         D, E, F, X, Y, Z

Then how my search will work. I mean how to search it in a string.
And if I store all the VIA_ROUTES in different different columns then how it will be..? Please suggest me with your own technique. It is not urgent but I am planning to make a basic bus route search, so your comment with help is appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d model it as a cyclic graph. Each bus stop is represented by a vertice. Each direct connection between two stops is represented by an edge labelled with the route number; consequently, each route is a sequence of connected edges. Make the edges directed, too. Not all routes travelling from stop A to stop B will necessarily also travel from stop B to stop A in the other direction.

    Probably want to populate each edge with the estimated travel time, a measure (or measures) of variance for that leg — at 2am on a Sunday night, the variance might be low, but at 5pm on a Friday evening, it might be very high, and list of departure times as well.

    Then its a matter of graph traversal and finding the “least cost” route, however you choose to define “least cost” — Factors you might want to consider would include:

    • Total travel time
    • Total time spent waiting for the next leg to depart.
    • Wait time at any individual stop.
    • Distance?

    One should note that too much wait time is bad (ever spend 40 minutes waiting for a bus in January when it’s -10 F?). Too little is bad, too, as it increases the probability of missing a connection, given that buses tend to have a fairly large variability to their schedules since they are highly responsive to fluctuations in local traffic conditions.

    That’s how I would do it.

    I don’t believe I’d try to solve it directly in SQL, though.

    The model is a good fit for SQL, though. You need the following entities, and then some, since you’ll need to represent schedules, etc.:

    • Stop. A Bus stop. The vertices of the graph.
    • Route. A bus route.
    • Segment. The direct link between two stops. The edges of the graph.
    • RouteSegment. An associative entity representing ordered sequence of segments that composes the route.
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