Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Brandon Martin-Anderson edited this page Feb 4, 2014 · 192 revisions

OpenTripPlanner

Note: this wiki is targeted primarily at the OTP development community. For general information about the project, please visit opentripplanner.com

OpenTripPlanner (OTP) is an open source multi-modal trip planner, which runs on Linux, Windows, or potentially any platform with a Java virtual machine. OTP is released under the LGPL license. As of Spring 2013, the code is under active development, with a variety of working demos from around the world.

Latest Project Updates:

  • OpenTripPlanner has become Software Freedom Conservancy's thirty-first member project. Conservancy is a non-profit public charity that provides a range of financial and administrative services to member projects that develop Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS). By joining Conservancy, OpenTripPlanner obtains the benefits of a formal non-profit organizational structure while keeping the project focused on software development and documentation. See SFC for more details.

  • Portland's TriMet relaunched its official trip planner, now powered by OTP, on August 6, 2012, following a successful 10-month beta run. Read more about the project, and see also TriMet's 2009-2011 OTP Final Report.

  • See schedule/notes for our Weekly Check-In Discussions, held Thursdays at 1:30pm EDT (13:30 GMT-4)

  • For information about the OTP Workshop held in Portland, OR on July 13-15, 2011, see 2011 OTP Workshop

Status

OpenTripPlanner is presently at version 0.9. (see changelog)

The software currently:

  • Plans multi-modal walking, wheelchair, biking and transit trips
  • Takes travel time, road type/safety, and elevation data into account when planning bike trips, and provides an interface for customizing the weighting of these three factors
  • Shows graphical elevation profiles for bike trips
  • Imports data from GTFS, shapefiles, OpenStreetMap and the National Elevation Dataset
  • Plans trips in about 100ms in a moderate sized city
  • Exposes a RESTful API (XML and JSON), which other apps or front-ends can build on
  • Supports GTFS-Realtime for service changes and alerts
  • Supports Bike rental
  • Has experimental support for Raptor

See the Milestones page for more information on what's next.

See PerformanceNYC for performance characteristics in a larger metropolitan area with extensive transit coverage.

Basic OTP Architecture

At the core of OpenTripPlanner is a library of Java code that finds efficient paths through multi-modal transportation networks built from OpenStreetMap and GTFS data. Several different services are built upon this library:

The OTP Routing API is a RESTful web service that responds to journey planning requests with initineraries in a JSON or XML representation. You can combine this API with OTP's standard Javascript front end to provide users with trip planning functionality in a familiar map interface, or write your own applications that talk directly to the API. This API is provided by a Java servlet which can be dropped into any servlet container. In simpler terms, the OTP REST API is provided by a plug-in for standards-compliant Java web servers.

The OTP Transit Index API is another RESTful web service that provides information derived from the input GTFS feed(s). Examples include routes serving a particular stop, upcoming vehicles at a particular stop, upcoming stops on a given trip, etc.

The term "OTP Analyst" refers to parts of OTP that apply the routing engine to transportation network analysis rather than end-to-end trip planning. OTP Analyst includes:

The OTP Analyst Web Services provide network analysis results such as travel time maps and isochrones as standard web Mercator tiles or GIS rasters via a WMS-derived API. These web services are conceptually separate from the routing API, but are provided by the same servlet: once you have a working OTP trip planner you can also use it to produce travel time maps and other visualizations of transit service. See this blog post for discussion and examples.

The OTP Analyst Batch Processor is a command-line tool that handles more complex one-off network analysis tasks. It uses the same core routing library and data sources as other OTP services, but allows for very open-ended configuration and the inclusion of population or opportunity data. While configuration and use are currently somewhat opaque for non-developers, the "Batch Analyst" is becoming a powerful tool for visualizing how transportation networks affect access to urban opportunities. See this article for an example case study on the effects of hurricane Sandy in New York.

OTP Test Drive

Users and developers who want to try out OTP without manually building the project or installing a servlet container on their machine may use the following self-contained packages. These zip files combine a pre-built copy of OTP with a lightweight servlet container called Winstone.

Note 1: These files are currently very large (over 200MB). We plan to modify the build to reduce their size.

Note 2: In a production trip planning system, OTP is typically deployed as a plugin ("servlet") in a full-featured server like Tomcat (see architecture notes). Developers and more advanced users may want to simply build OTP from source and deploy the resulting WAR files to such a server.

The following tutorials will guide you through some experiments with the above pre-built zip files:

Code Repository

To browse the source online visit https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner.

To create a local copy of the repository, use the following command:

$ git clone git://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner.git

NOTE as part of a large project in the Netherlands we are currently restructuring the OpenTripPlanner project to reduce the number of Maven modules, clarify the naming scheme for those modules, and simplify installation and configuration for new users (see "stand-alone mode" below). The documentation in this wiki is therefore not in sync with the master branch of OTP (on which we carry out active development). All users and developers referencing this documentation will want to check out the stable git branch instead of the master branch, as it is quite recent but still follows the old naming scheme and structure.

Stand-alone mode

As of June 2013 we have begun implementing a stand-alone mode that will allow you to run OTP without a servlet container (and without Spring for that matter). It currently does work in the 'master' branch, but is barely configurable (it will always use the default search algorithm etc.) That might be all you need. This work is not yet complete but if you are interested in trying it out.

Building OTP

git clone https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner.git
cd OpenTripPlanner
mvn clean package

This will give you the otp.jar file (in the otp-core/target/otp.jar directory) that you'll need to build a graph and run the server.

Building a graph

You'll need a GTFS data file (e.g., google_transit.zip) and an OpenStreetMap data file (e.g., map.osm) in a single directory on your computer (e.g., the directory above OpenTripPlanner where you first executed the command to clone the repo).

Then, from the OpenTripPlanner directory:

java -Xmx2G -jar otp-core/target/otp.jar --build ../

...if your GTFS and OSM files are in the directory above your OpenTripPlanner directory. This will give you the Graph.obj file you need to run the server.

Running the server

Copy the Graph.obj file into the /var/otp/graphs directory. Then, from the OpenTripPlanner directory, do:

java -Xmx2G -jar otp-core/target/otp.jar --server

By default this will look for graphs in /var/otp/graphs and bind to port 8080. The REST API is available at /otp-rest-servlet/ws/ or /otp-rest-servlet/, and / serves up static content (the client javascript). Once the server starts up, try some REST API URLs to verify that it's working:

  • http://localhost:8080/otp-rest-servlet/ws/metadata
  • http://localhost:8080/otp-rest-servlet/ws/routers

You could also do:

java -jar otp-core/target/otp.jar -p 9090 -r mexico --server

in order to run on port 9090 and load the graph for routerId 'mexico'. You can also specify the base directory for graphs with -g. As we continue to work on standalone mode, it should continue to function in the same way but just be enriched with more command line options. Try the --help option for a full list of command line parameters.

Developer Information

Contact Info

Send questions and comments to the user mailing list.

Discuss internal developement details on the dev mailing list.

Chat with us via IRC on Freenode channel #opentripplanner or chat through the web

File bug reports via the Github issue tracker. Note that the issue tracker is not intended for support questions or discussions. Please post them to one of the mailing lists instead.

Stakeholders and User Information

Background

The project began a collaborative effort among TriMet, OpenPlans, and the developers of FivePoints, OneBusAway and Graphserver, and has since grown to encompass a global community of users and developers. More information on OTP's origins is available at the Project History page.

In November of 2013, OpenTripPlanner became the thirty-first member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Financial Support

OpenTripPlanner is a member project of Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in New York, and donations made to it are fully tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Donate via Paypal (including Visa, Mastercard, AMEX or ACH)

Donate by wire transfer

Donations are accepted by wire transfer. Please contact [email protected] for wire transfer instructions. Please be sure to note in the email what country the wire transfer will initiate from and what currency it will be in.

Donate by paper check

Send paper check donations, drawn in USD, to:

Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc.
137 Montague ST STE 380
Brooklyn, NY 11201-3548 USA

Checks should be payable to Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. Please indicate "directed donation: OpenTripPlanner" in the memo field of the check.

Add a custom footer

The documentation on this wiki is outdated and should not be used

unless you are intentionally working with legacy versions of OpenTripPlanner. Please consult the current documentation at readthedocs

Clone this wiki locally