From now on our route planner GraphHopper Maps allows not only foot, car and bike routing, we’ve also added motorcycle, mountain bike and racing bike:

This means all other applications using our Directions API are now able to use more vehicle types as well and offer their users a more specific routing experience and a more precise route optimization.

Thanks to contributor ratrun those vehicle types were already included since several months, but the necessary hardware requirements and the involved heavy import procedure would have made it too time consuming to maintain for us. But as soon as we released GraphHopper 0.5 with multiple vehicles support (for the speed mode), we were able to dramatically reduce the RAM and import time requirements, so that now one vehicle type is very cheap to be added. Side note: the flexibility mode always supported multiple vehicles but is currently not used in our Directions API.

To give you an example: before the change 3 JVMs (per server) with one vehicle each and roughly 3*30GB RAM were necessary. Now the base graph takes roughly 15GB and every added vehicles is about 8GB RAM which adds on top making roughly a 30% RAM reduction and that even with 3 more vehicles. And due to the parallelization of our import we are able to create the vehicle profiles in nearly the same time as for one vehicle, still more RAM is necessary.

The necessary refactorings were the most complex one in GraphHopper history as they did not only require a fundamental internal API change, but also we had to make sure the performance for several different configurations were not affected. Thanks to our huge unit, integration and performance test suite we were on the safe side, still the refactoring disclosed some shortcomings, as I wrote once at Twitter:

Do not fear none-trivial refactorings.
This way you can test your tests 😉

Having a more consistent deployment also allowed us to enable elevation for all vehicles, including motor vehicles. Still keep in mind that currently only bike recognizes the elevation while routing itself.

So, let us know what you think, have fun and expect more exciting news soon!

We are happy to announce that Stefan from jsprit will join forces with GraphHopper and together we’ll not only create a flexible and fast routing engine with optimization features in our Directions API but also push forward the business with GraphHopper in general – stay tuned 🙂 !

Open Source Projects

What does this mean for the open source projects? jsprit and the GraphHopper core will stay separate, well supported open source projects, and nothing will change towards the community or our commitment.

GraphHopper Directions API

Since several months we have worked together to create a new and easy way to solve route optimization and traveling salesman problems which led to several improvements on both open source projects already.

Additionally, we jointly developed our new Route Optimization API and a simple way to solve traveling salesman problems via our Routing API. The latest work is a simple route editor which makes creating and debugging requests against the route optimization API a lot easier and intuitive, and thus it makes a whole lot of fun to play with our Optimization API. Read more about it here.

English version below

Heute haben wir, Stefan Schröder and Peter Karich, einen der 5 Hauptpreise des Gründerwettbewerbs IKT Innovativ gewonnen der auf der IFA verliehen wurde. Über 200 Ideenskizzen wurden eingereicht und wir sind hoch erfreut, dass die Jury sich u.a. auch für uns entschieden hat.

In der Presse wurde darüber wie folgt berichtet:

• Offizielle Pressemitteilung vom Wettbewerb IKT Innovativ
• Heise.de
• Presseportal.de
• Nordbayerischer Kurier
• Fuer-Gruender.de
• Bayreuth.de
• Munich-Startup.de

Today we, Stefan Schröder and Peter Karich, received here in Berlin on the IFA one of the 5 main prices of the founder competition, IKT Innovativ (innovative information and communication technologie). Over 200 project ideas were submitted and we are happy to be one of the selected.

Read more about it in the press:

• Official press release of the competition ‘IKT Innovativ’
• Heise.de
• Presseportal.de
• Nordbayerischer Kurier
• Fuer-Gruender.de
• Bayreuth.de
• Munich-Startup.de