FUNCTIONAL OVERVIEW

A journey planner is a specialized electronic search engine used to find the best journey
between two points by some means of transport. Journey planners have been widely used in the
travel industry since the 1970s by booking agents accessed through a user interface on a
computer terminal, and to support call centre agents providing public transport information. With
the advent of the internet, self-service browser based on-line journey planner interfaces for use
by the general public have become widely available. A journey planner may be used to provide
schedule information and plan your journey properly. It even provides a flexibility to make
changes to your journey as per the time constraints and places of interest.

“Payaniga - A Journey Planner”, is a website that aims to help users plan trips,
discover new places of interest and alter their trip plans on the fly.

BRIEF HISTORY/BACKGROUND:

A journey optimization problem Seven Bridges of Konigsberg, 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 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. 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. 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. 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.

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 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.

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 Google Transit Data Feed
Specification.

EXISTING TECHNOLOGY:

Typically Journey Planners use an efficient in-memory representation of the network and
timetable to allow the rapid searching of a large number of paths. Database queries may also be
used where the number of nodes needed to compute a journey is small, and to access ancillary
information relating to the journey.

A single engine may contain the entire transport network, and its schedules, or may allow
the distributed computation of journeys using a distributed journey planning protocol such as
JourneyWeb or Delfi Protocol.

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 hand 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.

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INPUT REQUIREMENTS

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 SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT

 Operating System: Ubuntu

 Web application framework: Django

 Database: Mongodb

 Programming Language: Python language

 LAMP stack

HARDWARE REQUIREMENT

Minimum requirements

 Processor: AMD or INTEL processors

 RAM: min 256 MB of RAM

 Hard Disk: 4 GB of disk space

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PROJECT CYCLE

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 START
FLOWCHART

Input location(s) location(s)

Search Database for

desired location
Suggest a
location
Yes
Is location found?
No
Is spelling mistake?

Yes

Retrieve location No
information
Warning message

Location Location Location Location Retrieve nearby

description map details photographs distance matrix places ofinterest

Display location data Extract Display location photos Calculatedistances Display different
latitude & using different places of interest
longitude algorithms to user

Display the places on a map Display the time required (hrs) & distance
Select (km)
the places of interest

Confirmation from user to exit

STOP
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 ARCHITECTURE

Browser Database

Web server

In this architecture whenever user submitting the inputs in browser, it sends it to the web
server in turn it fetches the data from database and sends response to the browser.

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 METHODOLOGY

The project is sub-divided into 2 modules:

 Data acquisition module
 The web application module

Data acquisition module

In order to build a site that serves users of the form described in the usage scenarios
above, we need to build a location matrix which gives point to point distance between various
places. The data acquisition module aids us to build such a matrix. Data is obtained from various
sources - either manually or via algorithms.
We also need a good datastore to store location metadata.

Pre-requisites

 Good knowledge of data structures and graph algorithms

Major issues and key project take-aways

 Determining alternate paths to a destination - use of shortest path algorithms and

traveling salesman problem (genetic algorithm may be used)
 Determining points of interest on the way to the destination - use of shortest path
algorithms and traveling salesman problem
 Determining points of interest close to some location (given latitude, longitude) - use of
shortest path algorithms and traveling salesman problem
 Mining information and metadata about various places - use of NLP, clustering and other
mining techniques
 Data storage techniques - relational databases, key-value pairs etc

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Web application module

The web application module allows users to use the data that we have gathered to answer
their questions and plan their trips. It consists of a web front-end with interactive functionality to
solve the scenarios above.

Pre-requisites

 Good knowledge of programming languages and object oriented programming paradigm

Major issues and key project take-aways

 Knowledge of the LAMP stack and challenges faced in building web applications
 Good design skills
 Advanced web application development skills - Search Engine Optimization.

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 FUTURE WORK

Our project aims at planning a trip easily. In future, we can make our website more
interactive and attractive by implementing some of the features like whenever a user clicks on a
particular place on the map, it should either pop out a message giving the description of that
place or some useful information about that place. We can make our website more attractive by
applying different themes depending on the speciality of the requested place. This can be
implementing using dynamic web page creation.

This project is being developed as the prototype of a journey planner. We have tried our
best to include as many places as possible according to the time and budget. Our project can be
enhanced to provide more and more information as possible by adding information about places
into our database. Our project has been designed to easily upgrade according to the time and
needs.

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CONCLUSION

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