Overview

Uhhh PLANit who?

PLANit stands for PLanning, Assignment, and Networks, Integrated Toolkit. It aims to provide ready-to-use tools for Transport professionals, academics, researchers, students, or anyone interested in transport methodology.

What is it?

PLANit provides you with an integrated toolkit that allows you to run traffic simulations ranging from a simple shortest-path algorithm to more complex equilibrium traffic assignment models. It also has an extensive suite of tools to perform data format conversions to extract road, rail, waterway networks from, for example, Open Street Map and GTFS, into the native PLANit format, or more general formats such as, for example, Shape and/or MATSim.

The toolkit is available in both Java and Python. The Java API is the most flexible and efficient, yet requires a bit more knowledge of programming. The Python API is designed to run traffic assignment simulations and data format conversions that are easy to configure even for users without much/any programming experience. So, take your pick!

PLANit is fully modular to the point that many of the components and algorithms can be used stand-alone or in combination with other PLANit components (or your own).

PLANit has its own data format for reading inputs and writing outputs by using a combination of XML and CSV, but this can be switched out for any other format by writing your own input/output format. Some alternatives are already available such as the TNTP, MATSim, OSM, GTFS format. For traffic assignment results there is also an option to persist results in memory rather than to disk, allowing you to embed PLANit in your own application pipeline.

Why do I want it?

Below some possible reasons to consider PLANit for your project

  • What is it good for?: It provides easy to configure and efficient implementations of some of the best-known and

  • most used traffic assignment methods and algorithms. It avoids reinventing the wheel and allows you to focus on what

  • is important in your project. You can also use it to quickly extract networks and public transport services from publicly

  • available data sources (OSM/GTFS).

  • What is it not good for?: If you are after fantastic graphical user interfaces, PLANit is not for you. All inputs

  • and outputs are (plain)text, or in-memory. Any visualization you will have to conduct yourself.

  • What is it not yet good for?: We are working on dynamic traffic assignment extensions, but these are currently

  • not yet available.

  • Open source: Did we mention PLANit is open-source? Well, it is!

Where should I go next?

Useful links to find your way in this documentation

The remainder of the documentation is specific to either the Python or Java API

Python

Java