History
A journey optimisation problem Seven Bridges of Königsberg, was central to the original formulation of Graph theory by Leonhard Euler.
Dijkstra's algorithm forms the basis of modern journey planner search algorithms and provides an optimal solution to simple searches.
Early journey planning planning engines were typically developed as part of the booking systems for high value transport such as air and rail, using mainframes databases and OLTP systems. Well known examples of such Computer reservations system (CRS) include Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo, and the Rail Journey Information System developed by British Rail.
As computing resources became more widely available, journey planner engines were developed to run on minicomputers, Personal computers, and mobile devices, and as internet based services accessible though Web Browsers, Mobile browsers, SMS, etc.
In the early 2000s Large scale metropolitan web planners such as Transport for London's journey planner became available. Starting in 2000 the Traveline service provided all parts of the UK with multimodal journey planning and in 2003 the Transport Direct portal was one of the first Nationwide systems, allowing comparison of travel by any mode between any two points in the country,
Many entities, including municipal government, state and federal government, and for profit companies operate web sites now offer trip planning services for large metropolitan areas, or even country-wide. For profit companies such as EasyJet, National Rail Enquiries or Deutsche Bahn typically operate sites free to people planning trips, relying on ticket sales and advertising for revenues.
As the size of the transport systems covered by journey planners has increased, protocols and algorithms for distributed journey planning have been developed, allowing the distributed computation of journeys using networks of journey planners, each computing parts of the journey for different parts of the country. The EU Spirit, JourneyWeb and the Delfi Protocol are all examples of distributed journey planning protocols. Xephos is another example of a distributed journey planning network with information populated by its user base.
Another development in the 2000s has been the addition of Real-time travel information to update the current schedules to include any delays or changes that will affect the journey plan.
In 2005 Google started developing Google Transit a journey planning engine that works in conjunction with Google Maps, using data imported in the General Transit Data Feed Specification.
Read more about this topic: Journey Planner
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