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I am researching for ways to do network analysis or routing optimization with open source GIS. ArcGIS currently has an extension for this called Network Analyst but would like to keep my analysis with open source resources. In short I am looking to see if any open source GIS has some type of TSP tools. My current application is based on DotSpatial but that framework doesn't seem to have any of that functionality.

What I do have is a point featureset with all the cities of interest. The problem will include the start city and the end city. I would like to see if its possible to have GIS determine possible ways to connect the two within numeric and spatial restrictions. Say for example there can be no more than 3 inner connections and the connections have to stay within a football shape created between the start city and end city. Or maybe the top three shortest paths between the two end points. These are fuzzy restrictions right now but just want to see if there are any libraries out there that could do something like this.

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There is very limited functionality for routing in QGIS. Using the Road Graph plugin.

There is extensive routing capability in PostgreSQL/PostGIS using pgRouting. This integrates with QGIS as well with the pgRoutingLayer plugin. However pgRouting is not a plug and play option, it requires quite a bit of setup to get a routeable network.

Finally there are some option for web based front ends. Perhaps the most open source is OSRM. It takes an OSM road network and provides routing on it. It can be used for general routing analysis through API calls, or visually through a web front end.

I think the answer is that, yes. It can be done with Open Source. But it is considerably more complex to set up.

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  • You can try with aequilibrae plugin for QGIS
    – nagib
    Nov 20, 2018 at 18:33
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In addition to HeikkiVesanto answer, there is Geographic Network Model in GDAL, few command line utilities and appropriate QGIS Plugin - QNetwork and Geoprocessing tool.

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  • GNM looks promising. Will have to check it out via QGIS.
    – HeikkiVesanto
    Nov 19, 2018 at 16:26
  • Very interesting. DotSpatial has some GDAL plugins but GNM is not one of them. I'm going to investigate how to use the library and see if I can integrate it into DotSpatial.
    – sinDizzy
    Nov 19, 2018 at 16:45

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