Short History
TO Mapster was started after the gruelling course called Real Time at the University of Waterloo.
The course had such a terrible workload ( I started counting during the last two weeks and my total
was 176 hours! ) that we developed an addiction for coding hours on end. So, after we left to do our normal
jobs, we felt something missing.
Mapster is a direct result of the need to write cool and exciting software that benefits people.
How does it work?
First, we determine the stations in your vicinity. To do so we rank them by distance and get 5 closest stations.
Then, we ran the shortest time algorithm between each pair of stations and include walking distance to determine the optimal path.
In more detail, we use Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm for trip planning( soon to change ). Dijktra's algorithm consumes a specially created graph that includes not only distances between stations, but also the times when the trips occur. This allows TO Mapster to take advantage of a changing geometry of a transit network.
The server side of Mapster is written almost completely in Python.
In more detail, we use Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm for trip planning( soon to change ). Dijktra's algorithm consumes a specially created graph that includes not only distances between stations, but also the times when the trips occur. This allows TO Mapster to take advantage of a changing geometry of a transit network.
The server side of Mapster is written almost completely in Python.
