[OSGeo-Discuss] Thoughts on how to use elevation in routing

Bob Basques Bob.Basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us
Mon Sep 13 12:16:43 EDT 2010


Stephen, 

You didn't explicitly mention it, but TIME might be an additional item to include, as in different vehicles will take different amounts of time to traverse.  Once you ave a good set of constants for the different types of vehicles, you could add in "Time to Traverse" as a graph indicator. 

I would also lobby for the downhill sections for inclusion in a Bicycling report.  As in this route is generally less strenuous, etc.  :c) 

This next one is getting a little out there, but combining the elevation with Weather conditions might prove useful in extremes, either in height or in extreme weather (or both).   

Adding in Flood plains might be another interesting exercise, might not be much call for this though, generally. 

bobb 




>>> Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com> wrote:

Hi all,

(This is cross posting from the pgrouting list, sorry for the dups.)

I have preprocessed some shapefile data and added elevation information
in the Z value of the coordinates. I'm wondering how to best utilize
that in routes and would like any thoughts or ideas you might be willing
to share.

The obvious answer is to wrap the elevation data into the cost values as
this is simple and straight forward and does not require code changes.
This brings me to what have other people done or thought about doing in
this regard?

Here are some random thoughts I have had on this in no particular order:

o for bicycles, we probably only care about UP grade and length. This
would imply that segments need to be in a directed graph with different
costs going from A-B vs. B-A based on the upgrade

o for trucks, maybe an un-directed graph is ok, because they need to use
low gear both up and down depending on the grade and length

o for motorcycles, hilly terrain tends to mean more twisty roads which
are more fun to ride so lower costs for roads with lots of elevation
changes.

grade = (rise / run) * 100

where run should be the 2D length of the segment.

Is there a "standard" way of factoring grade into the route calculations?

Doing some google searches, most all papers I saw related to fuel and
emissions and did not seem to be very applicable to the above.

Thanks,
   -Steve W
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