Shortest Path Analysis on Geospatial Data Using PgRouting

Abstract

Geographic information systems (GISs) are becoming the most popular field in recent years. A GIS is an application or system which is designed for capture, storage, manipulation, analysis, and presentation of spatial or geographic information. Geographic location is the key term or information for the geographic information without which the data can’t be said to be spatial or geographic. The approach mentioned in this paper explores two famous problems, i.e., GIS and graph theory algorithms to find out the shortest path between the two nodes. This paper explores the working of “shortest path analyzer” plugin developed for QGIS [1, 2] to find out the shortest path between two nodes (source and destination) in road network (geospatial data) using various algorithm approaches of PgRouting [3, 4] extension of PostgreSQL [5] database. A detailed overview of this plugin is presented in this paper. PgRouting provides some methods by which the cost parameter of distance from the source node to the destination node can be calculated dynamically. In this research, various algorithms (provided in PgRouting) are implemented to calculate the best and an optimal shortest path between two nodes and the comparison of various shortest path algorithms [6] is made to calculate the shortest path with minimum cost. This paper is a comprehensive compilation of theory as well as an implementation of PgRouting library functions in the form of the plugin of QGIS in the spatial network analysis domain. This research is implementing a geospatial database at the backend and PyQGIS plugin at the front end to calculate and visualize the shortest path between two nodes of the road network using various combinations.