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routing

Planning the most efficient route with Optimap

Submitted by jim on Thu, 2010-03-04 10:00

Does your organization provide services in the community regularly?  Do you have regular routes of sites to visit: neighborhood elderly, community centers, or even regular errand runs?  There are many situations when a local nonprofit or community organization needs to plan a logical route between multiple locations in a city or region.  But what's the most efficient route when you have several - or a dozen - sites to visit?

In the computer science world, this is a classic computational challenge that programmers have long studied, referred to as the "traveling salesman problem" because of its original context: given the distances between each city, what is the most efficient route between a number of cities, so that you visit each city once and only once?

GPSDrive

"GpsDrive is a car (bike, ship, plane) navigation system. GpsDrive displays your position provided from your GPS receiver on a zoomable map. The maps are autoselected for best resolution depending of your position and can be downloaded from the Internet. Speech output is supported via the "speech dispatcher" software. All GPS receivers supported by gpsd should be usable"

Filling a gap between commercial software and the people is GPSDrive is this free and open source gem.

URL: 
http://www.gpsdrive.de/

BBBike: Bicyclists tool for Germany

Cool screenshots to boot!:

"BBBike is an information system for cyclists in Berlin and Brandenburg (Germany). The application has the following features:

  • Display a map with streets, railways, rivers, parks, altitude and other features
  • Find and show routes between two points. The route-finder can be customized to match the cyclists preferences (fastest or nicest route, keep wind direction and hills into account etc.)
  • A bike power calculator
  • Automatically fetch current Berlin weather data"
URL: 
http://bbbike.sourceforge.net/