extime

Extime fetches flights information provided by Avinor, the company operating most Norwegian airports, and converts them into NeTEx-compliant timetables.

Avinor publishes flights information through its flight data web service portal, using a custom XML format.

These dataset are downloaded, combined and converted into NeTEx timetables compliant with the Nordic NeTEx Profile. Ultimately the flight timetables are injected into the Norwegian National Journey Planner and used to provide multi-modal journey planning.

Dataflows

Input

Extime makes use of the following dataset provided by Avinor:

• Flights timetables: https://flydata.avinor.no/XmlFeed.asp
• Airport names: https://flydata.avinor.no/airportNames.asp
• Airline names: https://flydata.avinor.no/airlineNames.asp

Output

Extimes converts the flight data into a set of NeTEx documents packaged as a zip file following the Nordic NeTEx Profile delivery format.

Scope

Extime extracts and converts only a subset of the flights published by Avinor. Flight are filtered through a whitelist of airports and a whitelist of airlines.

Reference data

Extime generates NeTEx timetables that reference airports as NeTEx StopPlaces and Quays. These StopPlaces and Quays should be declared in the Norwegian Stop Place Register.

By convention, flights arrive/depart from a Quay identified in the Stop Register by a local reference following the format:

AVI:Quay:[Airport code]

where [Airport code] is the IATA code of the corresponding airport.

Example for Oslo airport:

AVI:Quay:OSL

Configuration

Airport and airlines

Airports and airlines are configured in:

• no.rutebanken.extime.model.AirportIATA: Airports whitelist

• no.rutebanken.extime.model.AirlineIATA: Airlines whitelist

• no.rutebanken.extime.model.AirlineDesignator: Airlines whitelist

• netex-static-data.yml: Metadata for airports and airlines

General Application configuration

General application configuration parameters are set in the Spring Boot configuration file application.properties

Main parameters:

Parameter name	Description
avinor.timetable.feed.endpoint	Flights timetables endpoint
avinor.airport.feed.endpoint	Airport names endpoint
avinor.airline.feed.endpoint	Airline names endpoint
avinor.timetable.scheduler.consumer	Configuration of the frequency of the Flight information import
avinor.timetable.period.months	Time window in months for which flight data are imported

System integration

Production environment

In the production environment, Extime uploads the generated NeTEx archive in a common storage area on Google Storage.

Once the archive is uploaded, Extime notifies Marduk that a new delivery is available by publishing a message on a Google PubSub topic.

Access to Google Storage and Google PubSub is configured through the properties blobstore.gcs.* and spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.* respectively.

Development environment

In a development environment:

• Google Storage can be substituted by the local file system. Use the following properties:

spring.profiles.active=local-disk-blobstore
blobstore.local.folder=/path/to/local/directory

• Google PubSub can be substituted by Google PubSub emulator. Use the following property:

spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.emulatorHost=localhost:8085

Building and running

• Build: mvn clean install
• Local run, three different run modes are available:
  • Dump mode, used to dump remotely fetched data to file for later reuse.
    • Enable dump mode in your local configuration file : avinor.timetable.dump.enabled=true
    • Choose your local directory, used to save the dump file, in property : avinor.timetable.dump.output.path=$HOME/dev/git/extime/target/dump
    • Configure number of months needed to fetch data for, starting from 00:01 AM the current date, by changing the property: avinor.timetable.period.months, default is 1 month
    • Run : mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring.profiles.active=dev -Dspring.config.location=$HOME/config/extime_application.properties
  • Offline mode, uses a dump file, produced by above mode, instead of fetching from remote. Should only be used in dev environment. (Great for debugging!)
    • N.B. To run this mode, the application expects the availability of a dump file, produced in dump mode.
    • If you have dump mode enabled, disable in your local configuration file : avinor.timetable.dump.enabled=false
    • Run : mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring.profiles.active=dev -Dspring.config.location=$HOME/config/extime_application.properties -Davinor.timetable.dump.file=$HOME/dev/git/extime/target/dump/dump.xml
  • Normal mode, fetches all data from remote feed. This is the normal mode used in test and prod environment.
    • Configure number of months needed to fetch data for, starting from 00:01 AM the current date, by changing the property: avinor.timetable.period.months, default is 1 month
    • Run : mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring.profiles.active=dev -Dspring.config.location=$HOME/config/extime_application.properties
• Local debug run with Maven, to enable maven debugging, add the following configuration to the spring-boot-maven-plugin plugin in pm.xml:

<configuration>
    <jvmArguments>-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=5005</jvmArguments>
</configuration>

• Run the docker image in docker on dev machine:
  • docker run -it --name extime -e JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xmx1280m -Dspring.profiles.active=dev" rutebanken/extime:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT

Readiness and liveness

For now, use the following health endpoint:

http://127.0.0.1:9001/health