KADAS Routing – a routing plugin for offline navigation

In the ongoing project KADAS Routing, we are extending the QGIS based application KADAS Albirero 2.0 with a routing module that is specifically designed for the offline use case. Valhalla (written in C++) serves as the routing engine and is running fully offline as a local service on devices with a Windows 10 operating system (the native development environment being Linux Debian). While Valhalla is usually run as an http server, here it was modified in order to make it accessible from the command line. One of the main advantages of Valhalla is the ability to use the same graph for different routing profiles (e.g. bicycle or car), making it an ideal candidate for offline usage where local RAM is rather limited.

Routing calculations are performed using freely available OpenStreetMap data or alternative data sets (e.g. as provided by Swisstopo for the Swiss domain). The routing module can be used to download and use dedicated data packages simply by selecting the required routing data package for a country or region.

This is done by the data catalogue tool, that allows the user to switch between different data repositories and the contained data sets of a specific geographical domain.

For the routing, the user can select from a list of routing profiles that include standard types (i.e. pedestrian, bicycle and car) as well as a range of military vehicles. The routing itself can be done only using a starting point and destination, or by including additional waypoints. Once the required parameters have been passed to Valhalla, the route is returned and the user can then enter navigation mode!

In addition to routing and navigation as the main functionalities of the plugin, we have also implemented the calculation of isochrones and isodistances. For the specified intervals (temporal or spatial) the corresponding buffer zones are processed by Valhalla and then displayed as layers in the map view and layer tree.

Further planned developments are, adding a night view for navigation on the client side. On the Valhalla side, a solution to the Chinese Postman Problem is currently under evaluation and could potentially result in a significant contribution to the Valhalla routing engine.

We would like to thank the customer and funder of this project Armasuisse. We are looking forward to the upcoming work this year!