Journey planner
A journey planner, trip planner, or route planner is a specialized search engine used to find an optimal means of travelling between two or more given locations, sometimes using more than one transport mode. Searches may be optimized on different criteria, for example fastest, shortest, fewest changes, cheapest. They may be constrained, for example, to leave or arrive at a certain time, to avoid certain waypoints, etc. A single journey may use a sequence of several modes of transport, meaning the system may know about public transport services as well as transport networks for private transportation.
Trip planning or journey planning is sometimes distinguished from route planning, which is typically thought of as using private modes of transportation such as cycling, driving, or walking, normally using a single mode at a time. Trip or journey planning, in contrast, would make use of at least one public transport mode which operates according to published schedules; given that public transport services only depart at specific times, an algorithm must therefore not only find a path to a destination, but seek to optimize it so as to minimize the waiting time incurred for each leg. In European Standards such as Transmodel, trip planning is used specifically to describe the planning of a route for a passenger, to avoid confusion with the completely separate process of planning the operational journeys to be made by public transport vehicles on which such trips are made.
Trip planners have been widely used in the travel industry since the 1970s, by booking agents. The growth of the internet, the proliferation of geospatial data, and the development of information technologies generally has led to the rapid development of many self-service app or browser-based, on-line intermodal trip planners.
A trip planner may be used in conjunction with ticketing and reservation systems. As an example, the largest single use of journey planning technology is used in Great Britain in railway booking systems, often referred to as RTJP, which processes the data between two or multiple points. This can be viewed on National Rail's official website.
History
First-generation systems
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some national railway operators and major metropolitan transit authorities developed their own specialized trip planners to support their customer enquiry services. These typically ran on mainframes and were accessed internally with terminals by their own staff in customer information centers, call centers, and at ticket counters in order to answer customer queries. The data came from the timetable databases used to publish printed timetables and to manage operations and some included simple route planning capabilities. The HAFAs timetable information system developed in 1989 by the German company Hacon, is an example of such a system and was adopted by Swiss Federal Railways and Deutsche Bahn in 1989. The "Routes" system of London Transport, now TfL, in use before the development of the on-line planner and covering all public transport services in London, was another example of a mainframe OLTP journey planner and included a large database of tourist attractions and popular destinations in London.Second-generation systems
In the 1990s with the advent of personal computers with sufficient memory and processor power to undertake trip planning, systems were developed that could be installed and run on minicomputers and personal computers. The first digital public transport trip planner systems for a microcomputer was developed by Eduard Tulp, an informatica student at the Amsterdam University on an Atari PC. He was hired by the Dutch Railways to build a digital trip planner for the train services. In 1990 the first digital trip planner for the Dutch Railways was sold to be installed on PC's and computers for off-line consultation. The principles of his software program was published in a Dutch university paper in 1991 This was soon expanded to include all public transport in the Netherlands.Another pioneer was Hans-Jakob Tobler in Switzerland. His product Finajour, which ran for PC DOS and MS-DOS was the first electronic timetable for Switzerland. The first published version was sold for the timetable period 1989/1990. Other European countries soon followed with their own journey planners.
A further development of this trend was to deploy trip planners onto even smaller platforms such as mobile devices, a Windows CE version of Hafas was launched in 1998 compressing the application and the entire railway timetable of Deutsche Bahn into six megabytes and running as a stand-alone application.
Early internet-based systems
The development of the internet allowed HTML based user interfaces to be added to allow direct querying of trip planning systems by the general public. A test web interface for HaFAs, was launched as Deutsche Bahn's official rail trip planner in 1995 and evolved over time into the main Deutsche Bahn website. In 2001 Transport for London launched the world's first large-scale multimodal trip planner for a world city covering all of London's transport modes as well as rail routes to London; this used a trip planning engine supplied by Mentz Gmbh] of Munich after earlier attempts in the late 1990s to add a web interface to TfL's own mainframe internal trip planner failed to scale. Internet trip planners for major transport networks such as national railways and major cities must sustain very high query rates and so require software architectures optimized to sustain such traffic. The world's first mobile trip planner for a large metropolitan area, a WAP based interface to the London using the Mentz engine, was launched in 2001 by London startup company Kizoom Ltd, who also launched the UK's first rail trip planner for the mobile internet in 2000, also as a WAP service, followed by an SMS service. Starting in 2000 the Traveline service provided all parts of the UK with regional multi-modal trip planning on bus, coach, and rail. A web-based trip planner for UK rail was launched by UK National Rail Enquiries in 2003.Early public transport trip planners typically required a stop or station to be specified for the endpoints. Some also supported inputting the name of a tourist attraction or other popular destination places by keeping a table of the nearest stop to the destination. This was later extended with ability to add addresses or coordinates to offer true point to point planning.
Critical to the development of large-scale multi-modal trip planning in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the development in parallel of standards for encoding stop and schedule data from many different operators and the setting up of workflows to aggregate and distribute data on a regular basis. This is more challenging for modes such as bus and coach, where there tend to a large number of small operators, than for rail, which typically involves only a few large operators who have exchange formats and processes already in place in order to operate their networks. In Europe, which has a dense and sophisticated public transport network, the CEN Transmodel Reference Model for Public Transport was developed to support the process of creating and harmonizing standard formats both nationally and internationally.
Distributed journey planners
In the 2000s, Several major projects developed distributed trip planning architectures to allow the federation of separate trip planners each covering a specific area to create a composite engine covering a very large area.- The UK Transport Direct Portal launched in 2004 by the UK Department of Transport, used the JourneyWeb protocol to link eight separate regional engines covering data from 140 local transport authorities in England, Scotland and Wales as a unified engine. The portal integrated both road and public transport planners allowing a comparison between modes of travel times, footprint etc..
- The German Delfi project developed a distributed trip planning architecture used to federate the German regional planners, launched as a prototype in 2004. The Interface was further developed by the German TRIAS project and led to the development of a CEN Standard |Open API for distributed journey planning' published in 2017 to provide a standard interface to trip planners, incorporating features from JourneyWeb and EU-Spirit and making use of the SIRI Protocol Framework and the Transmodel reference model.
- The European EU Spirit project developed a long-distance trip planner between a number of different European regions
Second-generation internet systems
Further evolution of trip planning engines has seen the integration of real time data so that trip plans for the immediate future take into account real time delays and disruptions. The UK National Rail Enquiries added real time to its rail trip planner in 2007. Also significant has been the integration of other types of data into the trip planning results such as disruption notices, crowding levels, CO2 costs, etc. The trip planners of some major metropolitan cities such as the Transport for London trip planner have the ability to dynamically suspend individual stations and whole lines so that modified trip plans are produced during major disruptions that omit the unavailable parts of the network. Another development has been the addition of accessibility data and the ability for algorithms to optimize plans to take into account the requirements of specific disabilities such as wheelchair access.
For the London 2012 Olympics, an enhanced London trip planner was created that allowed the proposed trip results to be biased to manage available capacity across different routes, spreading traffic to less congested routes. Another innovation was the detailed modelling of all the access paths into and out of every Olympic venue, with predicted and actual queueing times to allow for security checks and other delays being factored into the recommended travel times.
An initiative to develop an open source trip planner, OpenTripPlanner, was seeded by Portland, Oregon's transit agency TriMet in 2009 and developed with the participation of agencies and operators in the US and Europe; a full version 1.0 released in September 2016, is making it possible for smaller transit agencies and operators to provide trip planning without paying proprietary license fees.