[Routing] Fast Routing Engine - State of Play

[Lambertus]

Very exciting news! Any possibility that I (yournavigation.org) can be 
added as beta tester? If not, then no problem as KML route results are 
already supported and adding GPX in due time won't take long, but I'd 
like to have a peek at the future :-)


Dennis Luxen wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> at FOSSGISS 2010 I promised to deliver a fast routing engine for the
> community to use and ready for OSM data by May of this year. I intend to
> keep this promise.
> 
> Now, here is the good news. Since last saturday, the engine is running
> with OSM data and is serving requests. At the moment it is a private
> beta run as the software stability needs to improve. I have notified
> some of the OSM/routing people I know to let them have a try. Thanks to
> those who already tested it. I look forward to having an open beta soon.
> 
> The engine is going to be just an engine and not just another routing
> web site. I am not good at building web sites and there are already
> several of them. What they lack is fast and exact routing. Therefore,
> the engine intends to fill that void by providing an easy to use API
> that reachable by HTTP and returns an XLM file describing the route. At
> the moment it is a rudimentary GPX file describing the geocoordinates of
> all points on the route and does not feature route directions or any
> driving assistence yet. But this is certainly a major field of work for
> the future.
> 
> So, why is the source not public yet. There are several reasons. The
> first one is/was that I needed time to code it and who really needs just
> another half-working software product? Although the core algorithm had
> been open-source for quite some time, there was code that had to be
> rewritten, added or adapted to fit into the server setting. The other
> reason is that not all license issues are cleared yet. But don't fear,
> 'cause these issues will be resolved by May.
> 
> Meanwhile, the development will progress and the todo list is still
> getting longer everyday. I have several features planned, that are not
> implemented yet.
> 
> Let's take a brief look at some of the technical features:
> 
> The engine is based on the Contraction Hierarchies algorithm published
> by Geisberger et al. in 2008 (http://algo2.iti.kit.edu/1087.php). The
> current code runs on Linux but compiles on Mac OS X as well. Other OSes
> are untested at the moment.
> 
> The performance right now is dominated by communicating the result of
> the computation over the network. For a cross country route [1] through
> Germany it takes less than a milisecond to compute the route, but around
> 25 miliseconds to send the actual output to the client over the network
> on a Core2Duo CPU. Numbers for roads on the European road network are
> similar.
> 
> Best wishes and happy easter holidays,
> Dennis
> 
> [1] http://www.dennisluxen.de/route.zip
> 
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