[QGIS-Developer] Add support for travelling sales routing, Z-level and turn restrictions

[Paul Wittle]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

So the rationale here is fairly simple really; we already have tools in QGIS but I'm not convinced they provide adequate results without turn restrictions and/or z-levels. The travelling sales is a completely different point to which I think your comments apply more directly.

The tools provided as default are basic but I do think there is a distinction between entry level basic and simply providing a wrong answer. At present there is no way to stop it routing off bridges (as far as I can tell) so I'd like to try and fix it.

The ability to do basic routing appears to be a big selling point to my organisation and hence my priority on it. I accept that may not be the case for others.

The problem with pgrouting is that it relies on Postgres and we currently have Microsoft SQLserver and Oracle. My goal is to encourage our users to use QGIS but the decision about database choices is made at a high level and so ideally I'd like to be able to achieve something sensible without having to change database provider.

I think it is also important to note that the existing tools appear to be pretty close to being able to do what I need anyway. I'm really trying to improve the accuracy with turn restrictions and improve the usability a small amount by allowing routing via waypoints. Routing via waypoints is basically just a slightly customisable batch function of what already exists and I've already achieved that using my scripts.

As I said earlier, I accept that travelling sales may be a step too far but it seemed a logical target to me as I've spent a chunk of my career working as a transport planner and I see TSP routing as the entry point to network analysis really.

I may have missed some other options as I'm not aware of routing I can use from GRASS etc?

I completely agree with your final points and the purpose of this email / the proposal was to start to gather opinions on what might or might not work / be sensible and to gather a list of people that are interested really.

Thanks again for your feedback as it is helpful for me to work out where my views sit in comparison to other QGIS users 😊
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Régis Haubourg <regis.haubourg at gmail.com>
Sent: 17 October 2019 11:48
To: Paul Wittle <P.Wittle at dorsetcc.gov.uk>
Cc: qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] Add support for travelling sales routing, Z-level and turn restrictions

Hi Paul
For my information, what is the rationale of having it 100% in QGIS? I tend to prefer the approach of relying on dedicated lib or tools. We already have pgrouting, GRASS, python libs, various projects around.
I'm currently worried of the move we have of trying to do everything inside QGIS always, which starts to be a BIG project. Adding features should be done together by gathering maintainers, bug triagers all the time in mind.
Regards
Régis

Le jeu. 17 oct. 2019 à 10:10, Paul Wittle <paul.wittle at dorsetcouncil.gov.uk> a écrit :
>
> Hi,
>
>
>
> I’ve just added an enhancement proposal (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/159) for some work I would like to be involved with. I hope that is the right place to put it for discussion but I’m assuming there may also be some chat about it on here so I thought I’d start a thread.
>
>
>
> I have a young family so my intention to get developing in my spare time has been hampered by my lack of spare time but I think this is an area I would like to get involved with and I believe my current employer is supportive of the proposal as well so hopefully if I can kick something off then this might be a good starting point for me to get involved as a developer.
>
>
>
> I’d be keen to hear others thoughts and opinions and please accept my apologies if I’ve missed a similar discussion somewhere else and it turns out to be duplicate feature proposal.
>
>
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Paul
>
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