Project Description

An implementation of a star algorithm in python3 to find the shortest path between two given locations.

Steps to follow:

1. First download the map data from openstreetmap. After exporting, if the file doesn't have any filename extension then change it to a .osm format.
2. Use this tool to convert file format from .osm to .pbf. Make sure that you use the tool in the same directory where map.osm is present.
3. Get a rust distribution with cargo.
4. Run cargo --version to check if the package has been installed correctly. If not, use google. Run cargo install osm4routing to install osm4routing package. The .csv files have a header row, to know more, refer the osm4routing code here.
5. Use command osm4routing <path_to_your.osm.pbf> in cmd. This will yield two .csv files namely nodes.csv and edges.csv in C:\Users\<Username>

To run the code on this repo, the nodes.csv and edges.csv files can be downloaded. Pseudocode for A* star algorithm is given on wikipedia.

This implementation of A* is not very efficient for reasons:

1. The use of pandas dataframe for graph construction. The graph can be constructed directly by parsing the edges.csv file.
2. The heuristic function can make sql queries instead of searching lat lons in pandas dataFrame.

There are various such other possibilities that can help make this code run more efficiently. To contribute, please create a pull request.