From car routing to train routing
2019-09-23 , Großer Hörsaal

Adaptation of GraphHopper (routing and map matching) to the railroad context in order to serve a vast diversity of usages.


Today, OpenStreetMap is heavily used at SNCF (the French Railroad Company). We have implemented our own OpenStreetMap servers with customized tiles, geocoding, reverse geocoding, uMap, OverPassApi and GraphHopper.

OpenStreetMap rail data covers the European territory and offers a good accuracy. That is why we had the idea to rely on this great source of information for our internal needs and to go further.

GraphHopper is mainly used for car, pedestrian and bicycle routing. But there was a piece missing: train routing.

With the help of Geofabrik, the SNCF has adapted this great tool to make it work with OpenStreetMap rail data.

This will help us cover a vast diversity of usages such as customer information, delay calculation, distance calculation, positioning in tunnels, high accuracy positioning, map matching, and autonomous trains.

The project has been named OpenRailRouting and will remain open source.

Presentation:

  1. The Project (5 min)
    * Why OpenStreetMap?
    * Why Graphhopper?
  2. The transformation (technical part – 5 min)
    * Used Data
    * Main Code Adaptation
  3. Usages (10 min)
    * Embedded Real Time MapMatching
    * Client App (Mobile and Web)
    * Internal Usage to supervise the trains (Delay calculation)
    * Positioning in tunnels
  4. Questions (5 min)

Subtitle:

Adaptation of GraphHopper (routing and map matching) to the railroad context in order to serve a vast diversity of usages