go-routingkit

Go-routingkit is a Go wrapper around the RoutingKit C++ library. It answers queries about the shortest path between points found within a road network.

Installing and Building

go get -u github.com/nextmv-io/go-routingkit

Go-routingkit is currently supported on Linux, MacOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon).

Deployment

As go-routingkit uses cgo, any programs that use it should ensure that at runtime they can dynamically link against a C standard library version that is compatible with the version the program was built with. If using glibc, version 2.26 or higher is required.

The default AWS Lambda image does not meet the version requirements for glibc. However, the amazonlinux 2 image provides a more recent version of glibc that is compatible with routingkit. To use this image, simply use the dropdown under Runtime to select Provide your own bootstrap on Amazon Linux 2 when creating your lambda function. If creating your Lambda function with SAM, enter provided.al2 under the Runtime setting.

Usage

Initialization

All queries require first constructing a Client. Go-routingkit provides two clients, DistanceClient and TravelTimeClient, which measure and minimize route lengths using distance and total travel time, respectively.

distanceCli, err := routingkit.NewDistanceClient("philadelphia.osm.pbf", routingkit.CarTravelProfile)
timeCli, err := routingkit.NewTravelTimeClient("philadelphia.osm.pbf")

The DistanceClient constructs different routes depending on the mode of transportation, which is specified in its final argument. The TravelTimeClient only applies to cars, since they travel at substantially different speeds along different paths in the road network.

The constructors for DistanceClient and TravelTimeClient share their first two arguments: these are the path to an .osm.pbf file and the path to a .ch file (which may or may not already exist). The .osm.pbf file contains geographic data about the road network. You can download files that contain the region you're interested in from Geofabrik, or you can use another source such as the Overpass API to generate a file describing a custom bounding box.

The contraction hierarchy (.ch) file contains indices that allow routing queries to be executed more efficiently. If there is no file at the .ch filepath you pass to NewClient, routingkit will build this file for you. Reusing this file between initializations will lead to faster start times. Contraction hierarchies are specific to the travel profile and the route measurement, and should not be reused between different types of clients.

Distance and Travel Time Queries

routingkit.DistanceClient and routingkit.TravelTimeClient allow a few different types of queries for the shortest paths between points. Points are represented as []float32s where the first element is the longitude and the second is the latitude. Distances are represented as uint32s, representing distance in meters for DistanceClient and in milliseconds for TravelTimeClient.

The simplest query finds the distance between two points:

distance := distanceCli.Distance([]float32{-75.1785585,39.9532349}, []float32{-75.1650723,39.9515036})
time := timeCli.TravelTime([]float32{-75.1785585,39.9532349}, []float32{-75.1650723,39.9515036})

The Route query returns not only the distance between two points, but also a series of waypoints along the path from the starting point to the destination.

distance, waypoints := distanceCli.Route([]float32{-75.1785585,39.9532349}, []float32{-75.1650723,39.9515036})
time, waypoints := timeCli.Route([]float32{-75.1785585,39.9532349}, []float32{-75.1650723,39.9515036})

The Distances and TravelTimes methods perform a vectorized query for distances or travel times from a source to multiple destinations.

distances := distanceCli.Distances(
    []float32{-75.1785585,39.9532349},
    [][]float32{{-75.1650723,39.9515036}, {-75.1524708,39.9496144}},
)
times := timeCli.TravelTimes(
    []float32{-75.1785585,39.9532349},
    [][]float32{{-75.1650723,39.9515036}, {-75.1524708,39.9496144}},
)

And Matrix creates a matrix containing distances (or travel times) from multiple source points to multiple destination points.

matrix := distanceCli.Matrix(
    [][]float32{{-75.1785585,39.9532349}, {-75.2135608,39.9610131}},
    [][]float32{{-75.1650723,39.9515036}, {-75.1524708,39.9496144}},
)
matrix := timeCli.Matrix(
    [][]float32{{-75.1785585,39.9532349}, {-75.2135608,39.9610131}},
    [][]float32{{-75.1650723,39.9515036}, {-75.1524708,39.9496144}},
)

Snap Radius

The clients can find routes between points that are located within road networks, but it's often useful to query for points that do not fall exactly on a road, automatically snapping the point to the nearest location on a road. The client's snap radius defaults to 1000 meters and determines the maximum distance a point will be snapped to on the road grid. It can be set with:

cli.SetSnapRadius(100)

After being adjusted, this snap radius will be applied to any query done by the client.