A real-time enabled Vienna public transport router

In the following I explain my findings when I combined OpenTripPlanner with data from OpenStreetMap, the Wiener Linien Timetable in GTFS-format and the Wiener Linien Realtime Data API to create a realtime enabled public transport router for Vienna. Briefly I set up an OpenTripPlanner instance and provide a small service wich consumes the Wiener Linien Realtime API and provides it in GTFS-RT format to OTP.

Result

Motivation

For my time-assistant/smartwatch project digit I needed a routing component. During prototyping I used the Google Maps API, but I chose to host my own router for the following reasons:

• Google Maps does not incorporate realtime data of Wiener Linien. This is mainly because they only accept the realtime data in the GTFS-RT format. Wiener Linien provides currently just the static GTFS data as also stated in this article.
• No realtime data during route-planning in official apps. I must admit that I have no proof for that, but I planned some routes using Quando and Wien Mobil. I found that, while both apps provide a real time station departure monitor, the stoptimes in routes are different from them.
• Poor documentation and configurability of the Wiener Linien provided routing service. It often offers lazy routes (with less walking distance, but there would exist a faster route departing from a more far away station), has a poor default walking speed and is very picky with the coordinates (sometimes simply finds no routes). Also a combination of using this API together with OpenRouteService for the walking parts was unsuccessful because the Wiener Linien API was unhappy when I sent 25 planning requests at once (routes between the 5 nearest stops to start and destination).
• It is better to bind my open source project to other open source software as to a closed API.
• OTP also provides multimodal planning (bike & public transport was most interesting for me), configurable walking/biking speeds, preferred routes, and a large community developing it.
• None of the APIs I found provided the feature to subscribe to a planned route via webhook and get alerts when stop times change.

Approach

The Wiener Linien Realtime API allows to query realtime data per platform. There are nearly 6000 platforms featuring realtime information (altough some of them share a realtime id). It became clear that I can't torture the API with that many requests per minute (I assume this as an acceptable update rate). So I decided to implement a service which will query and feed the data of the platforms which are interesting to the consumers of my router at the moment to the OTP instance.

The following diagram gives an overview of the system.

The following steps were taken to setup the system:

1. Deploy an OTP instance with vienna data (Basically I followed this tutorial, but of course using the Wiener Linien GTFS data and an OSM Vienna extract)
2. Apply for a Wiener Linien Realtime API Key
3. Configure the OTP router to receive GTFS-RT updates via websocket.

If your OTP instance is working, but running with the --inMemory switch like in the tutorial, you should persist the generated graph first - omit the --inMemory when starting OTP with the --build command and you get a Graph.obj file. You should now create a directory structure like that:

otp/
otp/graphs
otp/graphs/wien
otp/graphs/wien/Graph.obj
otp/graphs/wien/wien.osm.pbf
otp/graphs/wien/wienerlinien.gtfs.zip
otp/graphs/wien/router-config.json

The router-config.json points to the websockert host/port providing the GTFS-RT:

{
    "updaters": [
        {
            "type": "websocket-gtfs-rt-updater",
            "feedId" : 1,
            "url": "ws://localhost:3003"
        }
    ]
}

OTP Proxy

TODO detailed description, packages, usage...

Problems

OTP cannot handle incomplete updates

When OTP receives stoptime updates for a stop of a trip, it calculates the delay and propagates it to the following stops, assuming that if a vehicle is delayed X minutes at a specific stop, it will also be X minutes late at the following stops. However, as it can't infer realtime data for the stops before, unfourtunately it does not just leave the schedule of those stops untouched, but sets the arrival/departure time to -1. This is a problem as these stops are considered invalid while planning. This issue is also discussed hereand there is an yet unmerged PR, which fixes this behaviour. OTP must be manually built to apply it at the moment.

It turned out simply not touching the stops prior to the first stop with known realtime data is not the solution, as this will lead to non increasing times on the timetable if the vehicle was early. Instead now, the TripUpdate always contains a StopTimeUpdate for each stop of a trip. The algorithm infers the missing stoptimes by

• propagating delays to following stops
• linearily increasing/decreasing delays on stops between stops with known, but different delays
• dividing a negative delay (vehicle is early) evenly to preceeding stops, from the first stop with realtime data to the trip start

OTP Websocket protobuf crashes on multiple TripUpdate Feed-Entities

In my implementation, each websocket transmitted FeedMessage only contains one entity. The GTFS-RT standard specifies multiple are supported. I validated the resulting protobuf successfully using the gtfs-realtime-validator but unfourniately it was not accepted by the OTP deserializer.