We’re happy to announce a new version of our QGIS Plugin ORS Tools. Additionally to the core services of giving easy access to our directions, isochrone and matrix API’s, the plugin now allows users to optimize their trips via a Traveling Salesman service.
The openrouteservice API’s included a Vehicle Routing Optimization Machine since quite a while, implementing the excellent Vroom library (© Verso) on our infrastructure. It allows users to plan fleet schedules in an optimal way, where multiple locations need to be visited in the optimal order by one or more vehicles.
This feature is finally implemented in our QGIS Plugin and is activated by the click of a button. It’s available for interactive routing as well as for batch routing using processing algorithms:
Before and after waypoint optimization
In normal mode it will only optimize over the waypoints between the first and the last, assuming the user knows the start and end locations. However, you can also choose to optimize the start or destination. Be aware, that each user only has a contingent of 50 optimization requests per day: https://openrouteservice.org/plans/.
Furthermore, ORS Tools has a few more improvements:
- Improved GUI, allowing to properly setting up to 50 waypoints per route
- Avoid countries option: Specifying numerical ORS Codes for countries from this list, they can be avoided
- Elevation along the route is returned automatically, so now the output is LineStringZ
- New batch routing algorithm allowing the input of MultiPoint geometries, where each Multipoint feature will be treated as one route