[postgis-users] New project for driving directions using postgis / pgrouting

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Olivier Kouame wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Sorry if this has been brought up before but I've been looking for a
> project that provides driving directions on top of postgis/pgrouting.
> I've found quite a few discussions about it and sites that have
> implemented it but couldn't find anything actually production-ready.
> I'm thinking of starting a new project to provide this functionality
> and would really appreciate any suggestions / advice / code examples
> that would help get this started. Or if anyone knows of an existing
> project that provides this, even better!

As Daniel Kastl has posted, I have a demo of something I developed for a 
client. See that link.

I do agree that having more information on the wiki would be a good 
idea. I posted a summary of how to do this on the list about 6-12mo ago. 
If I or someone else gets a chance to collect that info from the 
archives it would be good to drop that into the wiki and I would be 
happy to edit and update it.

You might also be interested to know that we are also building driving 
directions into a new routing library as part of OpenGraphRouter 
project. If we can achieve our goals I how the OpenGraphRouter can be 
used but pgRouting and other database engines in the future. This 
started as a GSoC project and Ashraf, the student, has spent some 
additional time working on it. He also plans to apply to GSoC again this 
year to continue work on it. The code currently has a very crude phase 0 
pass at doing driving directions. It still needs some work to compress 
duplicate instructions and stuff to make it more user friendly, but the 
basic logic for extracting that information is there. Ashraf is 
currently up to his eyeballs in thesis and other class work, but is in 
the process of adding complex turn restriction support that will 
hopefully support data models as complex as Navteq's.

Check out   http://opengraphrouter.sourceforge.net/  for more info.

Part of the reason that we can build a generic tool in OpenGraphRouter 
and not so easily in pgRouting, is because we define a graph file that 
supports this and then we load the data into that graph file.

We might want to consider some refactoring of pgRouting to take a 
similar approach. But before we can decide that, I think the newly 
forming PSC needs to get its feet on the ground and decide what 
direction we want to take the product and how we will do that.

Best regards,
   -Steve