Time-dependent restrictions and temporal road closures are so far not considered in any freely available software for route planning. Heidelberg University and the company GraphHopper aim to address this issue in their joint project “TARDUR – Temporal Access Restrictions for Dynamic Ultra-Flexible Routing”. The project started in March and is supported by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure with a 100,000 Euro research grant within the mFUND initiative.
Road restrictions may depend on the time of day, the day of the week, or the season. Typical examples are nightly driving bans for trucks, one-way streets alternating between the directions and winter barriers in mountains. If the navigation or routing software ignores these restrictions the user might end up at a closed road. This not only increases traffic and has negative impact on the environment, but also costs time. Especially for emergency and service vehicles such delays are critical.
The goal of the project is to develop and efficiently implement an algorithm that produces high-quality routes with accurate arrival time calculation by taking into account time-dependent constraints. The algorithm will be integrated into the open-source solutions from GraphHopper and OpenRouteService which are publicly available under an open license. The fact that both rely on the open-access OpenStreetMap road network guarantee that a wide range of services, companies and organizations will profit from this new feature.
About GraphHopper GmbH
GraphHopper is a young company focused on providing solutions for route planning. Their namesake software is freely available and well-established, especially in the open-source domain and among users of free geodata.
About GIScience Research Group of Heidelberg University
The GIScience Research Group of Heidelberg University has sound expertise in the field of routing algorithms and applications. She has been developing the open source platform OpenRouteService, https://openrouteservice.org, since 2008. With the OpenRouteService for Disaster Management based thereupon, she also provides route planning for humanitarian missions in international civil protection.
About mFUND
Since 2016, the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) has been funding R&D projects related to digital data-based applications for Mobility 4.0 with a research initiative called mFUND. mFUND not only provides financial assistance but, with different event formats, it fosters networking between stakeholders from the political sphere, as well as the business and the research communities. It also promotes access to the mCLOUD data portal.
