OSRM — The Complete Guide: A Fast Free Road Routing Engine for Routes and Travel-Time Matrices
OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) is an open-source routing engine that computes the shortest or fastest route on the OpenStreetMap road network — in milliseconds, even across a whole country. It is not a desktop program but a service you run on a server and query through an API.
OSRM — Open Source Routing Machine
OSRM Project
A very fast road network routing engine — routes, distance matrices and service areas.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Routes — between two or more points, with time, distance and directions.
- Matrices — travel times and distances between hundreds of origins and destinations.
- GPS map matching — snapping a sequence of points to the road network.
- Stop ordering — a short round trip through a list of points.
- Profiles — car, bicycle and foot, which you can customise.
Uses and limits
In engineering it lets you compute ambulance or fire engine response times from every point in a city, plan waste collection rounds and build origin-destination matrices. OSRM itself does not compute service areas (isochrones) or solve fleet routing problems with constraints; those are built on top of its matrices, with companion tools or your own code. Times are based on configured speeds, not on traffic congestion.
Related tools
For public transport and multimodal trips — OpenTripPlanner. To fix the road network — JOSM. For traffic simulation with congestion — SUMO.
OpenTripPlanner
OpenTripPlanner Project
A multimodal routing engine — journey planning and public transport accessibility analysis.
Get it from the vendor
JOSM
OpenStreetMap community
Advanced OpenStreetMap editor — roads, buildings and infrastructure, with GPS and aerial imagery import.
Get it from the vendor
SUMO
German Aerospace Center (DLR) / Eclipse
Microscopic traffic simulation — every vehicle modelled individually on a real road network.
Get it from the vendor
QGIS
QGIS.org
Open-source GIS for spatial analysis, layer work and map production.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
OSRM is a fast, free routing engine for accessibility and operations analysis, for anyone willing to set up and maintain a small service.