Engineering Multimodal Travel: My Journey at Waynaut
Hello everyone! I am writing this to share the story of my first professional experience at Waynaut. I started my journey with this company in 2014 when I moved to Milan. At the time, I was still a student and new to the world of technical interviews and professional development. I am deeply grateful to the team for believing in my potential and giving me the chance to grow.
What was Waynaut?
Waynaut was a startup with a bold mission: to create a platform capable of selling multimodal travel solutions.
But what does “multimodal” actually mean? It refers to combining several transport options—flights, trains, buses, and public transport—into a single, seamless journey. The goal was to provide customers with a complete set of solutions based on their criteria, mixing different types of transportation in one package.
A Concrete Example
Imagine you need to travel from Milan to Salerno.
- In Milan, you have several airports.
- In Salerno, however, there is no airport.
So, a typical user would need to:
- Buy a flight from Milan to Naples.
- Take a taxi or bus to Naples Central Station.
- Take a train from Naples to Salerno.
A multimodal platform solves this headache by finding this combination automatically and offering it as a single result (and potentially a single ticket), avoiding the need to visit three different websites.
Fun Fact: Waynaut’s vision was supported by research from the European Commission and aligned with the multimodal vision of Amadeus.
My Role & The Tech Stack
When I joined Waynaut, my primary responsibility was to contribute to the development of this platform from the ground up. We had to make several architectural decisions to handle this complexity.
The Foundation: Java & Geonames
We opted to use Java as our main programming language and MySQL as our database system.
Our first major challenge was creating a comprehensive database of “access points”—airports, train stations, bus stops, and city centers. After careful analysis, we established our foundation using Geonames, which allowed us to map thousands of locations accurately.
Integrating the Providers ( The REST vs SOAP Struggle)
Simultaneously, our commercial department secured partnerships with major transportation providers, including:
- Kiwi.com
- Trenitalia
- BusBud
- Volagratis
- Traghetti Lines
My job was to integrate their APIs into our system. This was challenging because every provider used a different technology. Some offered straightforward REST APIs, while others relied on protocols like SOAP. We had to build an abstraction layer to normalize all this data into our internal domain model.
The Core Challenge: The Graph & The Algorithm
Once we gathered data from these multiple sources, the real engineering challenge began: How do we combine them to generate the best route?
It became evident that we were dealing with a Graph Structure:
- Nodes: represented the access points (stations, airports).
- Edges: represented the connections (flights, train rides).
The question was: How could we provide optimal solutions in milliseconds?
The A* (A-Star) Algorithm
After researching various shortest-path algorithms, we settled on implementing the A* Algorithm. We enhanced it using a reactive programming approach to handle the asynchronous nature of calling multiple external APIs simultaneously.
Academic Milestone: This implementation became the central theme of my Engineering Thesis at the Università degli studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli titled “Shortest path algorithms with a multimodal case study”.
Infrastructure & Evolution
Beyond the core algorithm, I had the opportunity to work with:
- MongoDB: For handling unstructured data.
- AWS (Amazon Web Services): Where our entire infrastructure was deployed and scaled.
After our first successful launch, Waynaut caught the attention of big players in the industry. Eventually, the company was acquired by the lastminute.com group.
This journey was truly remarkable. Building a novel, highly challenging system from scratch gave me the perfect foundation to specialize in the technological domain of travel.