MOTIS stands for Modular Open Transportation Information System. It is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate efficient planning and routing in multi-modal transportation systems. Developed to handle large-scale transportation data, MOTIS integrates various modes of transport - such as walking, cycling, sharing mobility (e-scooters, bike sharing, car sharing), and public transport - to provide optimized routing solutions.

MOTIS currently supports the following input formats:

• (One) OpenStreetMap osm.pbf file for the street network, addresses, indoor-routing, etc.
• (Multiple) GTFS feeds for static timetables
• (Multiple) GTFS-RT feeds for real-time updates (delays, cancellations, track changes)
• (Multiple) GBFS feeds for sharing mobility

Planned: GTFS-Flex, NeTEx and SIRI

MOTIS provides an easy-to-use REST API (JSON via HTTP) with an OpenAPI specification (source) that allows you to generate clients for your favorite programming language.

MOTIS is a swiss army knife for mobility and comes with all features you need for a next generation mobility platform:

• routing: one mode walking, bike, car, sharing mobility / combined modes
• geocoding: multi-language address and stop name completion with fuzzy string matching and resolution to geo coordinates
• reverse geocoding: resolving geo coordinates to the closest address
• tile server: background map tiles

MOTIS uses efficient traffic day bitsets that allows efficient loading of full year timetables! Loading one year of timetable doesn't take much more RAM than loading one month.

Features can be turned on and off as needed.

• Create a folder with the following files.
• Download MOTIS from the latest release and extract the archive.
• Download a OpenStreetMap dataset as osm.pbf (e.g. from Geofabrik) and place it in the folder
• Download one or more GTFS datasets and place them in the folder

./motis my.osm.pbf my.gtfs.zip

This will preprocess the input files and create a data folder. After that, it will start a server.

This script will execute the steps described above for a small dataset for the city of Aachen, Germany:

Linux / macOS

# set TARGET to linux-arm64, macos-arm64, ... to fit your setup
# see release list for supported platforms
TARGET="linux-amd64"
wget https://github.com/motis-project/motis/releases/latest/download/motis-${TARGET}.tar.bz2
tar xf motis-${TARGET}.tar.bz2
wget https://github.com/motis-project/test-data/raw/aachen/aachen.osm.pbf
wget https://opendata.avv.de/current_GTFS/AVV_GTFS_Masten_mit_SPNV.zip
./motis aachen.osm.pbf AVV_GTFS_Masten_mit_SPNV.zip

Windows

Invoke-WebRequest https://github.com/motis-project/motis/releases/latest/download/motis-windows.zip -OutFile motis-windows.zip
Expand-Archive motis-windows.zip
Invoke-WebRequest https://github.com/motis-project/test-data/archive/refs/heads/aachen.zip -OutFile aachen.zip
./motis aachen.osm.pbf AVV_GTFS_Masten_mit_SPNV.zip

• Developer Setup
  • for Linux
  • for Windows
  • for macOS
• Advanced Setups