Route planning on GTFS using Neo4j

Abstract

GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) is a standard of Google for public transportation schedules. The specification describes stops, routes, dates, trips, etc. of one or more public transportation company for a city or a country. Examining a GTFS feed it can be considered as a graph. In addition in the last decades new database management systems was born in order to support the big data era and/or help to write program codes. Their collective name is the NoSQL databases, which covers many types of database systems. One type of them is the graph databases, from which the Neo4j is the most widespread. In this paper I try to find the answer for the question how the Neo4j can support the usage of the GTFS. The most obvious usage of the GTFS is the route planning for which the Neo4j offers some algorithms. I built some storage structures on which the tools provided by Neo4j can be effectively used to plan routes on GTFS data.