SettingUpAnalyst

The OTP project has primarily been focused on conventional web-based trip planning services, but its multi-modal routing engine supporting open data formats has many other non-passenger-facing applications ranging from research on land use / transportation interactions to data-driven regional transportation planning.

The OpenTripPlanner Analyst extension was previously an external module, but has been merged into the main OTP project (May 2012). This has several advantages: setup is simpler, as there are less issues keeping dependencies in sync, and only one server needs to be configured to handle both trip planning and Analyst queries. A single graph is shared by both services, potentially halving memory use.

In order to try out OTP Analyst, you must first build a graph and set up the opentripplanner-api-webapp module just as you would for normal OTP use: first configure, then deploy it from within a development environment like Eclipse or directly in a servlet container like Tomcat.

Once you have verified that OTP is configured correctly and planning trips, you can modify opentripplanner-api-webapp/src/main/resources/org/opentripplanner/api/application-context.xml, un-commenting the line <context:component-scan base-package="org.opentripplanner.analyst"/>. This will activate the analyst components when you restart the webapp.

You will also need to deploy the opentripplanner-analyst-client module in your servlet container, then point your browser at http://localhost:8080/opentripplanner-analyst-client/ (or wherever you deployed it) to work with the travel time tile layers. This separate client will talk to the appropriate Analyst API endpoint rather than the main trip planning API.