Intermodal journey planner

An Intermodal journey planner (IJP), or Trip Planner is computer system which can provide a traveller with an itinerary for an intermodal passenger transport journey. The system can provide timetable, routing and other travel information. A single journey may use a sequence of several modes of transport, meaning that the system must know about public transport services (bus, train, aeroplane, tram, metro) and about transportation networks (roads, footpaths, cycle routes) for private transportation (automobile, walking, bicycle).

Well known examples of such systems are Google Transit (varying coverage around the planet), Rome2rio (world-wide intermodal journey planner with reliable price information) and FromAtoB.com (for Europe).

Fundamental to an IJP is a journey planner engine with public transport timetable and road routing information and knowledge of the stops and interchanges: it may also be able to supply maps. An IJP will also have one or more user interfaces optimised for different purposes, for example, for online self-service use with a Web browser, for call centre agents, for use on mobile devices, or special interfaces for visually impaired users. An IJP will provide specific journey plans made up of one or more journey legs. It may also support other representations such as full timetables, stop departures boards, etc.

Fully featured IJPs are capable of incorporating real-time information along with the planned timetable, for example to provide live departures from a particular stop, to include incident information about situations that may affect a journey, or to compute journeys that take into account predicted delays, allowing the user to perform journey repair to recover from a disruption to normal services. IJPs may also cover road-real time data and may be considered part of an Intelligent Transportation Systems.

...
Wikipedia