barbeau
commented
9 years ago One solution is to allow OSRM server regions, much like we currently support OTP regions, but ensure they are disjoint. By default these regions would be used based on the user's real-time location. If the user isn't within a region, then we fall back to the global OSRM server. We may also want to include an option to prefer global OSRM server. We should also support an option to enter a custom OSRM URL in the app to test a new server, much like you can test a custom OTP server URL in the app today.
Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) is a highly efficient open-source routing project for driving directions using OpenStreetMap data. There is a global demo at http://map.project-osrm.org/.
We could potentially add driving directions to OTP Android using the OSRM REST API, either using the global demo (if you don't want to set up your own OSRM server) or custom OSRM servers, ala our current OTP server region model.
OTP currently isn't very strong in the driving directions area, so OSRM might be a good counterpart to support alongside OTP REST API for existing OTP regions, at least until OTP driving directions get better.
For regions where we currently don't have OTP server coverage, we could at least provide driving directions via the OSRM global instance. This would be better than our current scenario, where we only support a limited portion of the world, namely areas that set up their own OTP server.