About Routing Demo

This routing demo is provided using LeadDog Consulting data, pgRouting modified and extended by iMaptools.com, using OpenLayers for the map management and UMN Mapserver for map image rendering. While we have been working with these tools for sometime our strength is in the backend server-side work.

To use this demo do the following:

zoom into the city of your choice
select "set start point" and click the map to set the point.
select "set stop point" and click on the map to set the point.
click "navigate", then click "Calculate Route"
and a route shown as a red line should show on the map, and driving directions should show at the bottom of the page.
you can copy or click the link "Permalink" and it will remember the map and the route so you can email it or bookmark it.

Some features of this demo are:

We have used a lot of OpenSource projects as the building blocks for this demo, which helps to keep the delivery costs down.
iMaptools has written the explication module that generates the natural language driving directions. This works with pgRouting to generate the driving directions. Directions are all table driven so we can add most any language, by creating tables with appropriate phrases. You will notice that we current support English, Arabic and French (some phrases may not be translated yet).
Our goal was not to create a polished application, but to keep it as a simple example so that clients can rapidly understand the technology and integrate it into their existing applications.

Some known problems and limits are:

These routes are being computed on an old 333Mhz CPU with only 384MB of memory. So it can be VERY SLOOOW! please be patient.
Routes across borders are problematic as the road segments to not always align. This problem is being addressed and the data is improving with every release.
Routes will sometimes fail because of configuration settings I have mad to keep this old system running fairly smoothly. On a bigger new box we can relax these setting. When I have time to do some system administration on my network, We will move this demo to a newer pices of hardware.