Cognitive routing

A bit background

The last couple of months I have checked out and tried Microsofts preview advanced routing projects. First when it comes to routing it is important to understand there is no rights or wrong. What is the best route? For some it might be:

• The shortest route?
• The fastest route?

Those are easy to find. For others they might be?

• A route with minimun slope?
• A route with rest areas with parking facilities?
• The most beautiful route?
• ... and so on.

So, the best route can be different depending on the purpose of the trip, vehicle and different regulations. So I always keep that in mind when it comes to routing.

Cognitive?

So is it cognitive as the URL implies? When I am in the middle of development, it is algorithms and algorithms with predicates. Combining this new routing services with advanced client tools is for sure a powerful tool. Adding historic traffic data to predict calculate routes, isochrones and solving TSP is calculating complicated stuff in short period of time. So the rise of cognitive GIS is coming.

It is at least really powerful and can solve complex problem and will be useful for many organisations.

Down the road

In order to understand what is next I look back to be able to connect the dots ahead. Isochrones is a natural derivat of routing. Although I guess the challenge with an algorithm that is heavily heuristic (which I assume Bing Maps are) is to polish away the heuristic but still be effective to accomplish isochrones. Next in this area would be to calculate things that is n minutes/distances away, but not closer than n unites from a given point as I describes in this post. Another natural evolvement is travelling salesman problem. Natural to integrate into the service module in CRM and may be a Geo-Calendar is on its way from Bellevue/Redmond.  

What to expect?

From a technical perspective I guess this new services will be available in a C# API like the Bing Maps REST Toolkit. That feels like a safe bet. On the client side I would except modules for routing, including the new services.

Another thing I would like to see is that Microsoft truly adapts GeoJson as in every time geographical data is send as JSON - I expect GeoJson.

Moreover, I hope the new services will cover at least Europe as well. If it scales in North America, the hard job with scaling is probably already done.

Thanks to Fredrik Jonsson for illustration.

Playing with project Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi is yet another interesting preview project from Bellevue addressing Travelling Salesmans Problem.

I have calculated and bid on several quotes regarding different scenarios where one of the cornerstone and foundation were based on different routing algorithms, such as Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). All kinds of businesses such as transporting kids to school, service staffing serving restaurant machines, telecom service staff, elderly care and so on. The characteristic of these projects where expensive, complicated with none or small amount of guarantee that the project would succeed within budget. The organizations that demanded these functions where small- and mid-size organizations. Many of the above projects dropped due to lack of funding. I believe vendors such as Microsoft play an important role providing these kind of organizations state of the art technology to enable them to be more efficient and maybe save a bit of the environment.

From a business perspective, it is easy to find applications within business applications such as Dynamics CRM. Or why not a geo-caching app within a city in combination with gamification. Well, may be geofication - Pokemon Go have been pretty successful.

But for me, in my life may be if the project is extended to cover Europe as well, Abu Dhabi might solve another problem - my weekends. A big part of my weekends is driving family, getting things from here and there and occasionally to football- (soccer) and hockey games. In between I need to eat and sometimes have time to see my friends. Unfortunately for me, at the moment Abu Dhabi is limited to US.

After playing a couple of hours with the API I have a couple of things running. It is pretty straight forward to query the API with HTTP requests. All of these extending routing projects from Microsoft will hopefully be backed up with an API that builds up the actual requst. And also a module to handle the actual result.

More information can be found here: https://labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/en-us/Project-Abu-Dhabi/documentation

Extended geospatial routing service in Bing Maps?

Sometimes GIS are complicated. Especially when it comes to access to data. I remember when I was building a dynamic routing engine based on PostGIS and data from Navteq. The dynamic part consisted of different vehicles behaving different in traffic. For example a truck or bus doesn't behave in the same way as a motorcycle or car. And moreover there can be obstacles, for example height and weight on bridges or the curve is too narrow. Most of the routing engines today are fast - not dynamic, or dynamic and less fast. 

However, after discussed with a good friend about the secret keys to routing, using most of networks SQL indexes skills, adding some routing tricks we manage to make it pretty fast and dynamic, for the time being (2011). But it was hard to make it scale. Routing is CPU heavy and there are no rights and wrongs when it comes to routing. For example, the best route can be the shortest, fastest, safest or maybe most beautiful! 

Isochrones 

During that time I also played with isochrones. An isochrone is the routing extent, for example 50 km from a given point. Not just a circle. In every case 50 km radius covering a bigger area than the corresponding isochrone. I have seen many municipalities using radius for example for the fire department. However, project Nanjing addresses that issue.

Radius and Isochrone showing approximately 60 km from

Sundsvall, Sweden

Projects as Nanjing are important making complicated use cases available for the public. Many organizations doesn't have the knowledge, fundings etc to pull this off. Using real distances, or time to calculate coverage or use it for further processing. I hope many other data providers with API:s will consider taking a GeoJSON as an argument. In that way, it will be possible to from a GeoJSON as one criteria among others. Project Wollongong from Microsoft probably makes that behind the scenes. 

After trying the Nanjing API for the first time I was a bit surprised. I expected a GeoJSON as response, but it was a JSON with geographical information. It is not a big thing and it is easy to serialize - but I was surprised. My experience is to use standards whenever it possible. And in this case sending geographical information as JSON I use GeoJSON. The projects API is pretty straight forward to use and there are examples in a handful of languages.

However project Nanjing as a really new cool useful geospatial feature available for preview as today. I hope it will be part of the Bing Maps platform since it address an important useful feature.

There are several others project available for preview and a presentation on channel9.