A journey planner is a specialized electronic search engine used to locate the best journey between two points by some means of convey. These journey planners have been extensively used in the travel industry since the 1970’s by booking agents accessed through addict interface on a computer terminal, and to shore up call center agents providing public transport information. With the arrival of the internet, self-service browser based on-line journey planner interfaces for use by the general public has become generally available. A journey planner may be used in combination with ticketing and reservation systems, or just to make available schedule information.
The journey planners find one or more suggested journeys between an origin and a destination. The origin and destination may be specified as geospatial coordinates, named topographical places such as Timperley, Scunthorpe, Grimsby, points of Interest (British Museum), or names or identifiers of points of access to public transport such as bus stops, stations, airports, or ferry ports. A location finding process will typically first determine the origin and destination into the nearest known nodes on the transport network in order to calculate a journey plan over its data set of known journeys. Journey planners for huge networks typically use a search algorithm to hunt a graph of nodes representing access points to the transport network and edges representing potential journeys between points. Different weightings such as distance cost or ease of access may be associated with each edge. Typically journey planners use well-organized in memory representation of the network and timetable to allow the speedy searching of a large number of paths. Databases queries may also be used where the number of nodes wanted to figure a journey is small, and to access additional information relating to journey.
A journey planner engine may be accessed by different front ends, using a Software Protocol or Application Program Interface specialized for journey queries, to provide a User Interface on different types of device. The development of Journey planning engines has gone in hand with the development of data standards for representing the stops, routes and timetables of the network such as TRANSXCHANGE, NAPTAN as well as TRANSMODEL that ensure that these fit together.
Posted in Journey Planner