Smart Mobility
What we do
Disaster managers need to calculate routes with very specific requirements, outdoor athletes would like to run their course best exclusively in green spaces and wheelchair users need to take curbs, way surfaces and many more into account. The broad range of application scenarios calls for innovative, reliable and scalable geo services tailor-made to meet specific use cases. To provide these crucial services, we develop globally available services and interfaces enabling a vast number of special mobility profiles, which significantly improve user-friendliness and value.
If you have a business or research related inquiries feel free to contact us via e-mail: support@smartmobility.heigit.org
Humanitarian Services
HeiGIT strives to support the community by providing humanitarian services that aid both the general public in their every day lives and first responders in critical situations. From the openrouteservice client for disaster management to green and heat stress-stress avoiding routing, we continue to develop and improve tools that make this possible.
Openrouteservice for Disaster Management
The openrouteservice client for disaster management is being developed to support the work of humanitarian actors in the most disaster prone regions of the world. Thanks to the work of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and the Missing Maps project, in disaster situations the OSM data is continually updated and enriched with critical information.
Road Network Critical Assessment for Disaster Management
With the increasing accumulation of extreme weather events and environmental disasters, the need for quickly available information about the street infrastructure and the accessibility of hospitals gains importance. The road network can be analyzed using the isochronous functionality of the openroutservice and intrinsic data quality analyzes based on ohsome API of the HeiGIT.
Avoid Blocked Roads and Regions
openrouteservice enables the user to select streets, regions and even countries to avoid during the routing process. This is a crucial feature for logistics during natural disasters. We are specifically investigating how affected areas in the aftermath of earthquakes or floods can be quickly identified and taken into account during the response planning.
Green and Heat-Stress Avoiding Routing
Due to climate change many users take into consideration how environmental friendly their planned routing is. Our services include personalized routing options that allow users to plan routes avoiding noise and preferring shade. Projects like meinGrün show the shortest routes to green spaces in cities.
Hourly Updates
We provide hourly updates for geodata of Southeast Africa, the Philippines and flooded regions in Germany. Further regions can be requested, if major catastrophic events necessitate it.
Fleet Scheduling for Disaster Management
Our route optimization services can be used to calculate optimal routes for the distribution of humanitarian aid goods using multiple vehicles across a multitude of streets. Take a look at this example!
Barrier-Free Routing for Wheelchair Users
Wheelchair routing poses a unique challenge. Not only does it require careful selection of the relevant OpenStreetMap information, but it also calls for continuous methodological innovation. We closely cooperate with advocacy groups and responsible government bodies to realize functional solutions tailor-made for the target group.
Covid-19 Vaccination Routing
A route planning app helps you find the route to your nearest Covid-19 vaccination center in Germany. You can use this route planner now at https://impfzentrum.openrouteservice.org.
A Large Range of Routing Options
One special aspect of the openrouteservice pertains to its large number of routing profiles with configurable options. We strive to meet as many users’ requests as possible to support customized route planning. To achieve that goal, we continuously look for innovative ideas and new use scenarios and implement them in close cooperation with academic base research. For example, we are currently examining how to achieve the healthiest, quietest and most environmentally sound routes, and how to automatically identify suitable landmarks for navigation.
Traveling Stress-Free by Car
Many users highly value the option to manually unselect individual street types. This feature enables drivers to avoid freeways, toll roads, or tunnels. Aside from these standard options, we are developing methods to also take into account green, environmentally sound or heat-avoiding routing as well as factors pertaining to comfort and safety.
Population Statistics by Region
The isochrones were enriched with worldwide population data, which can optionally be returned by the interface. This supports an estimate of the number of citizens living in the perimeter of a hospital or a school. We will continue to include additional datasets to be able to better answer questions such as “which options do I have in my area of reachability?”
Traveling Off-Road
Mountain bikers and hikers need intelligence about the slope and condition of trails. Our profiles provide this information and additionally enable the athletes to factor in their individual level of fitness, making our profiles a popular choice for planning outdoor activities.
Geocoding for Address Identification
A worldwide database can be used for translating coordinates into addresses and vice versa. This feature is offered as a free service through the openrouteservice interface.
openrouteservice.org
The openrouteservice is much more than a mere routing service: we offer a plethora of services fit to serve a large range of applications. Our service relies on OpenStreetMap data and other sources of free spatial data. We are outspoken proponents of open source frameworks and make all of our projects available on GitHub.
The Route Planner
The openrouteservice assists you in planning your routes – anywhere in the world. To support the largest number of geographic and personal use possible, we offer numerous options to enable each user to plan his or her route as individually as need be.
Accessibility Analyses with Isochrones
Which points can you reach from one specific location within a set time? Accessibility analyses addressing such questions are visualized on maps using isochrones. With the isochronous functionality of the openroutservice it is among others possible to assess the road network in disaster situations. Moreover, projects like Healthcare Access Analysis were realized.
Distance Matrices
If a large number of origin-destination pairings need to be analyzed rather than specific routes, we use distance matrices, which can calculate distances and travel times for thousands of points within a short time.
Points of Interest
The rich OpenStreetMap dataset offers a plethora of “points of interest” in different categories. Our services process them and offer specific search capabilities.
Our Philosophy: „Open Source“
We provide all the services and tools we develop on GitHub for everyone to use, and we appreciate the resourceful feedback we receive from the community.
Web Map Applications
The application maps.openrouteservice.org provides end users with a great number of different utilization possibilities.
Projects
| – comparing the accessibility of healthcare facilities around the globe | |
| – In cooperation with the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) and GIScience, various extensions to openrouteservice are being developed | |
| – adaptation strategies to support and protect at-risk groups during hot weather conditions |
Cooperation Projects with HeiGIT Support
| – Airborne Assessment of Critical Infrastructures (BMBF) |
Completed Projects
| – use geocoded social media data in selected regions to predict the time-dependent traffic state of the road network | |
| – Temporal Access Restrictions for Dynamic Ultra-Flexible Routing |
Completed Projects with HeiGIT Support
| – information and navigation on urban green spaces in cities | |
| – enable people with limited mobility to better plan their route through the city using their smartphones |
Additional Services & Tools
Interfaces und Plugins
To make using the openrouteservice easier, we offer a range of interfaces and plugins. Examples are packages for Python (openrouteservice-py) and R (openrouteservice-r) as well as a QGIS plugin (OSMTools).
openrouteservice-py
This SDK provides Python-developers with easier access to the openrouteservice interface.
openpoiservice
openpoiservice is a flask application which hosts a highly customizable points of interest database derived from OpenStreetMap data.
openrouteservice-r
This SDK provides R-developers with easier access to the openrouteservice interface.
Publications
This link will take you to an overview listing all our academic articles: Publications.