I need to highlight relevant locations in a google map when a user requests for a route.
I have found a few steps to implement. But got stuck at one point.
Let's assume that we have a collection of large number of points (a few thousands). We need to find out which of them lie in a (dynamic) route.
Step1: First filter out the points based on the route. That means, find the max-lat, min-lat, max-lon, min-lon of the route and apply this filter out to our group. So that we can figure out a lesser number of eligible candidates.
Step2: We can still filter out the unnecessary points using a utility library called RouteBoxer. (http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tags/routeboxer/1.0/examples/routeboxer-v3.html)
Step3: After above 2 steps, we have reduced the number of points to a few hundred from a few thousand. And these points would be somewhere around that route, though not exactly on it. This is where I face the challenge. How to check whether these points lie in that route? I dont think getting all the points a route and check the distance is a good solution (yeah, it will work. but..) as the route can be of any distance. Is there any way to check the minimum distance between a point and a route?
RouteBoxer will give you a list of polygons or LatLngBounds (if if gives polygons you can get LatLngBounds fron it anyway). You can cycle through each of your points and check if that point lies on any of those bounds using the contains method of LatLngBounds class.
Yes, there is dijkstra or kruskal algorithm.
Related
I have lists of between 100 and 10000 GPS location from vehicles driving around during some timespan.
I want to display that on a Google Map, using their API (with the Business licence if that matters).
As I see it, there are 3 options, all with problems:
1) Draw a polyline between all positions. Some positions are not that accurate so it looks like the route hits some buildings next to the road. I know that all positions are on a road. Also, it cuts some corners, and it doesn't look professional.
2) Display just the GPS positions in the map. This is not good either since the GPS positions are off the road (which they shouldn't be).
3) Draw the route using Maps API. This limits us to using 23 waypoints between the start and end positions. The route looks excellent and it follows the road (GPS positions next to the road are moved to the road automatically). But especially for longer time spans, this option means that the route displayed is incorrect (Google guesses the route taken between the waypoints - so from the 10000 GPS positions it only uses 23). And we can't display a clearly incorrect route.
Does anyone have a good/better way to show a driven route on Google Maps that follows the road but takes into account all/many given GPS positions?
Could you not chain the route using the maps API? It's not something I've done before so this answer could be a little vague but would it not be possible to segment your list of coordinates into chunks of 23 fire the requests and then display the resultant routes on the map?
I'm not overly sure on the return format so it may be necessary to mess with the output in order to give the illusion of the route, also you will likely not need to use every coordinate (perhaps exclude those that are within a small distance of each other for example being stuck at lights), otherwise the requests may take a long time.
We've actually moving away from option 3. The reason is that when the positions get moved to the nearest road, that is not always correct (like if you're driving on a parking lot), so since that doesn't always give the correct route, then we'll not take that path.
So I don't know if it's possible to chain several routes in the same map.
If I have a set of routes between various locations, and I have the lat/long co-ordinates for a point on the map, is it possible to find out if the point lies on any of the routes in my set? Basically if i get a GPS fix on a location, I want to find out if that location lies on any of my pre-determined routes.
This can be a complex computation. You should do this gradually and just check it roughly first. E.g. for every route, keep track of max-lat, max-long, min-lat and min-long. Then you can do a quick check if the point is within the max-min square. If that check is true - your point may be on your route, and you need to do more checks.
I would like to use the Google maps API to generate a route between my client's offices and one of their customers.
I would then like to find any customers (from my internal database) that are located within e.g. 10 miles either side of that route.
Basically I want to replicate this functionality:
http://gis5.com/pois_along_route/gm_pois_along_route.php
I'd appreciate any pointers that you may have on this
In general, you have to find distance from a given point (your customer) and a polyline (the route). The route from the google directions response is divided into legs, and the leg is consisted of multiple steps... In each step, you have path[] array of locations (pair of latitude and longitude). Let's call each location in the path[] array, a "Vertex".
You have to iterate through all vertices in the route (get all vertices from all steps in the route) and calculate the distance between the polyline created from the current "observed" vertices and the yours POI (Points of Interest - the Customers)
The shortest distance can be calculated by presenting the two vertices & the Customer's location as nVector. After this, by doing Vector cross product of the vectors you find the shortest (orthogonal) distance between the point and the polyline
I had similar problem recently and I solved it that way. I got the idea from the examples Here (look at the DISTANCE POINT TO POLYLINE OR POLYGON example Source code)
If you are confused from the Math involved, maybe this link might help you by explaining the concept of a Vector Cross Product. Also this could also help you to understand the nVector concept.
Because this kind of calculating the distance is pretty much time consuming (if you have many customer locations in the database), you might be interested of filtering some of the locations from the database and not performing calculations for them...look at my answer on this question about how to do filtering on locations based on the route that is shown on the map.
Hope this helps and give you some basic idea on how to start solving your problem. It took me a lot of time till to figure it out. Cheers.
So I am trying to think of a way to facilitate two things. It may end up being a two step process in the end but I was looking for input.
The first thing I need to do is accommodate locations with the same address. The two scenarios that come to mind are businesses that share a location and apartment buildings.
The second thing I need to accommodate is a business/nonprofit with no headquarters, just a town. Right now I just map them to the town center, but if multiple businesses have no headquarters I run into the first problem.
So I did some Googling and found a solution that involved having a list of locations alongside the map so you can click on them and the info window will pop up. This isn't a solution for me though.
What I was thinking of was using the location to map the first point. For the second and points after that moving the marker over .05 degrees or something marginal so that the marker shows up. The inherent problem with that is that what happens if 12 Main Street turns into 13 Main Street?
So any thoughts on what I could do?
Thanks
Levi
There's an extension by Martin Pearman called ClusterMarker that detects any groups of two or more markers whose icons visually intersect when displayed. Each group of intersecting markers is then replaced with a single cluster marker that looks different. The cluster marker, when clicked, simply centres and zooms the map in on the markers whose icons previously intersected.
A more advanced approach to this problem might be SQL - same address = same coordinates...
GROUP BY or HAVING COUNT > 1 ... would let you create multi-record coordinates.
In fact - before you can cluster client-side, you need to send out the data first, which means transferring much more than required in this case, which results in higher loading times and higher RAM utilization client-side ...plus all the useless JS processing of the clusterer.
Client-side clustering is only recommend when the coordinates are close to each other, but not when they are absolutely identical.
Think about it...
Is there a way using the Google Maps API to get back an "optimized" route given a set of waypoints (in other words, a "good-enough" solution to the traveling salesman problem), or does it always return the route with the points in the specified order?
There is an option in Google Maps API DirectionsRequest called optimizeWaypoints, which should do what you want. This can only handle up to 8 waypoints, though.
Alternatively, there is an open source (MIT license) library that you can use with the Google Maps API to get an optimal (up to 15 locations) or pretty close to optimal (up to 100 locations) route.
See http://code.google.com/p/google-maps-tsp-solver/
You can see the library in action at www.optimap.net
It always gives them in order.
So I think you'd have to find the distance (or time) between each pair of points, one at a time, then solve the traveling salesman problem yourself. Maybe you could convince Google Maps to add that feature though. I guess what constitutes a "good enough" solution depends on what you're doing and how fast it needs to be.
Google has a ready solution for Travel Salesman Problem. It is OR-Tools (Google's Operations Research tools) that you can find here: https://developers.google.com/optimization/routing/tsp
What you need to do basically is 2 things:
Get the distances between each two points using Google Maps API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/start
Then you will feed the distances in an array to the OR-Tools and it will find a very-good solution for you (For certain instances with millions of nodes, solutions have been found guaranteed to be within 1% of an optimal tour).
You can also note that:
In addition to finding solutions to the classical Traveling Salesman
Problem, OR-Tools also provides methods for more general types of
TSPs, including the following:
Asymmetric cost problems — The traditional TSP is symmetric: the distance from point A to point B equals the distance from point B to
point A. However, the cost of shipping items from point A to point B
might not equal the cost of shipping them from point B to point A.
OR-Tools can also handle problems that have asymmetric costs.
Prize-collecting TSPs, where benefits accrue from visiting nodes
TSP with time windows
Additional links:
OR-tools at Github: https://github.com/google/or-tools
Get Started: https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/get_started
In a typical TSP problem, the assumption is one can travel directly between any two points. For surface roads, this is never the case. When Google calculates a route between two points, it does a heuristic spanning tree optimization, and usually comes up with a fairly close to optimal path.
To calculate a TSP route, one would first have to ask Google to calculate the pair-wise distance between every node in the graph. I think this requires n*(n-1) / 2 calcs. One could then take those distances and perform a TSP optimization on them.
OpenStreetMaps.org has a Java WebStart application which may do what you want. Of course the calculations are being run client side. The project is open source, and may be worth a look.
Are you trying to find an optimal straight line path between locations, or the optimal driving route? If you just want to order the points, if you can get the GPS coordinates, it becomes a very easy problem.
Just found http://gebweb.net/optimap/ It looks nice and easy. Online version using google maps.