One of the many bottle necks of today’s web services are network latency and bandwidth. While I was working on a research paper, I recognized that G**gle encodes some information when you calculate a route on G**gle Maps. This process reduces, besides the gzip compression, the response from the server. This means that this is a speed improvement for the server client communication besides the zoom-level-generalization. You can read more about the “Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format” and how it works here.

We integrated this nice feature into the code of the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) project. The following table shows a few results for some sample routes comparing the old and the new file sizes (@ zoomlevel 18):

And if you are not a numbers person, let us put this in perspective: The fast routes just got faster! And that’s not all. As a second new feature the web frontend of the OSRM has shortlinks for the calculated route now. You can find the link of your route at the route summary. Try it out here: http://map.project-osrm.org/

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂


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4 responses to “Fast routes of OSRM just got faster…”

  1. flaimo Avatar

    seems like roads with access=private get evaluated, but not so for road with access=destination. any plans for adding that?

  2. DennisL Avatar

    Yes, will be added at some point in the future.

  3. Pink Duck Avatar
    Pink Duck

    Nice progress 🙂 I look forward to turn restriction support to make this a viable system for use.

  4. DennisL Avatar
    DennisL

    There will be an announcement in the coming weeks regarding turn restrictions.