Introduction
The Real-Time Public Transportation Accelerator contains components that track journeys where public transport agencies have provided GTFS and GTFS-RT feeds. On startup it pulls the static GTFS data from the provider and loads it into memory and makes it available to Spotfire®. Then on a configurable interval it will access the GTFS-RT feed and post updates to running trips including current stop and estimated times as provided by the agency.
And here's a video showing the Accelerator in action.
Download
The Real-Time Public Transportation Accelerator can be downloaded from the Exchange.
Business Scenario
The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a public data specification originating from Google that allows public transportation companies to publish their transit data in a standard format. This allows the data to be consumed by a variety of software applications. Thousands of transportation providers around the world use this specification on a daily basis. More information is available on the website: https://gtfs.org/.
The GTFS specification is composed of static data feeds that are generally updated on a daily basis, and GTFS RT which are real-time feeds that are updated every few seconds. This allows gives a true real-time view of operations inside the transport provider's network.
Concepts
GTFS consists of a series of standard data objects as outlined in the specification. Some agencies extend the specification to add objects and fields to existing objects, so the Spotfire® analysis will need to be customized based on the format of the data provided by each agency.
The Spotfire® analysis is configured to use these static GTFS objects:
| Agency | Transit agencies |
| Stops | Locations where vehicles pick up and drop off passengers |
| Routes | Transit routes. A route is a group of trips that are displayed as a single service. |
| Trips | Trips for a route. A trip is a sequence of two or more stops that occur during a specific time period |
| Stop Times | Times that a vehicle arrives and departs from each stop |
| Shapes | Defines vehicle paths for a trip |
In addition, the Streaming component makes use these GTFS RT objects:
| Trip Update | Real-time update of a trip along its journey, typically stop time estimates |
| Vehicle Position | Real-time positioning information for a vehicle |
Technical Scenario
This accelerator is a simple demo that shows how to integrate both GTFS and GTFS RT data into a single Spotfire® dashboard. It will download static GTFS data from the configured public transport agency, and then periodically pull GTFS RT data for updates.
Components
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