Tool for traveling salesman routing

Help and support
1

For planning my survey trips I am looking for a tool that takes a list of waypoints and calculates the optimal route that includes all these points (traveling salesman algorithm). Input should be a GPX file with typically 20 to 40 waypoints but could be any common geodata format. Output should be a GPX track or any other common format. The service should be available online, as a Linux desktop application or an Android app.

Up to now, I found that Osmand and OpenRouteService can do that kind of calculation. I was not satisfied with the result from Osmand. The ORS web frontend seems not to offer traveling salesman but it seems that Vroom uses ORS as a backend. Unfortunately, I did not succeed to feed my WP list into Vroom. I also tried the ORS QGis plugin. The result is really good but using QGis is a bit of complicated. I would prefer just throw in the WP file and save the track.

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2

GraphHopper has a Route Optimization API optimized for the “traveling salesman problem”. Mapbox has a similar solution called “Route Tuner”. See their API documentation here.

There are certainly other tools that can handle this via an API.

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3

I’ve used RouteXL with success.

It’s a commercial router, based on OSM data, free for up to 20 waypoints.

You can paste the waypoints as list of addresses or locations and download the resulting route as gpx.

4

Graphhopper does frustrate me with this behaviour. When I am planning a hiking route and adding vias, it recorders them.

Is there any way to turn it off?

5

@H, @mcliquid,thank you four your answers. I had a look at both RouteXL and the GraphHopper API but finally decided to stay with the ORS QGis plugin. It seems to offer the best overall effort/benefit balance in my case.

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