About pgRouting
pgRouting is an extension of PostGIS and adds routing functionality to PostGIS/PostgreSQL. pgRouting is a further development of pgDijkstra (by Camptocamp). It is currently developed and maintained by Orkney, JAPAN.
pgRouting provides functions for:
- Shortest Path Dikstra: routing algorithm without heuristics
- Shortest Path A-Star: routing for large datasets (with heuristics)
- Shortest Path Shooting-Star: routing with turn restrictions (with heuristics)
- Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP)
- Driving Distance calculation (Isolines)
Advantages of the database routing approach are:
- Accessible by multiple clients through JDBC, ODBC, or directly using Pl/pgSQL. The clients can either be PCs or mobile devices.
- Uses PostGIS for its geographic data format, which in turn uses OGC's data format Well Konwn Text (WKT) and Well Known Binary (WKB). This allows usage of existing open data converters.
- Open Source software like qGIS and uDig can modify the data/attributes,
- Data changes can be reflected instantaneously through the routing engine. There is no need for precalculation.
- The "cost" parameter can be dynamically calculated through SQL and its value can come from multiple fields or tables.
