OpenTripPlanner for R

Malcolm Morgan, Marcus Young, Robin Lovelace and Layik Hama

Summary

opentripplanner provides functions that enable multi-modal routing in R. It provides an interface to the OpenTripPlanner (OTP) Java routing service, which allows calculation of routes on large transport networks, locally or via calls to a remote server. The package contains three groups of functions for: (1) setting up and managing a local instance of OTP; (2) connecting to OTP locally or remotely; and (3) sending requests to the OTP API and importing the results and converting them into appropriate classes for further analysis.

Motivation

Routing, the process of calculating paths between points in geographic space that follow a transport network, is a fundamental part of transport planning and vital to solving many real-world transport problems. The outputs of a routing service, which can calculate many routes over a large area, comprises coordinates and other data representing a movement that is in some way ‘optimal’, based on a range of criteria (that the user should understand and be able to change). Routing services, such as the one provided by Google Maps, are a well- known and increasingly vital component of personal travel planning for many people (Bast et al., 2010). Less well-known, but perhaps equally important, is that routing services are also key to understanding aggregate travel patterns and guiding policy and commercial decisions (Giusti, Manerba, Perboli, Tadei, & Yuan, 2018). To meet this need for route planning capabilities, a wide range of both proprietary and open source tools have been created.

Banner photo credit: Alireza Attari on Unsplash