**Evolution of Trip Planners:**
– Journey planners have been used since the 1970s, evolving with the growth of the internet and geospatial data.
– First-generation systems were developed by national railway operators and transit authorities in the late 1980s.
– Second-generation systems emerged in the 1990s with the advent of personal computers and digital trip planners.
– Early internet-based systems introduced HTML interfaces for online trip planning.
– Distributed journey planners in the 2000s marked a new era in trip planning technology.
**Technological Advancements in Trip Planning:**
– Development of trip planning architectures like JourneyWeb protocol and distributed trip planning architecture.
– Introduction of real-time data integration and disruption notices in trip planning engines.
– Incorporation of the SIRI Protocol Framework and Transmodel reference model in trip planners.
– Use of routing algorithms such as Dijkstra’s, A*, and RAPTOR for efficient journey planning.
– Automated trip planners generate itineraries based on user-provided information, enhancing user experience.
**Data and Information Integration in Trip Planning:**
– Trip planners rely on various data types and sources, including road data, public transport data, and contextual data.
– Integration of Gazetteer data assists in indicating the relationship of transport interchanges with towns and urban centers.
– Real-time prediction information for public transport enhances route selection and travel planning accuracy.
– Incorporation of situation information in trip planners helps in revising computations based on incidents or events affecting the transport network.
**Public Transport Routing and Optimization:**
– Public transport trip planners support intermodal journeys and optimization criteria like fastest route, fewest changes, and price optimization.
– Long-distance rail and air trip planners suggest cheapest travel dates for flexible customers.
– Data requirements for trip planners include public transport schedules, access points, stop data sets, and timetable exchange formats.
– Fare prices sorting and filtering options are available in trip planners for enhanced user experience.
**Custom and Open Data Standards in Trip Planning:**
– Users can create travel itineraries individually using custom trip planners or pre-built databases of points of interest.
– Open data standards like GTFS and NeTEx facilitate data exchange between trip planners and ensure consistency in public transportation schedules.
– Google Trips and other mobility as a service platforms offer customized trip planning solutions with bookings and payments integrated into mobile apps.
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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 (unlike private transport which may leave at any time), 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.