OSM Road Monitor

Project Description

Problem

Up-to-date road data is an important prerequisite for applications such as routing and navigation in everyday life. This also applies to professional use in the fields of logistics and fleet management. The up-to-dateness of road data is particularly relevant in disaster scenarios, when there are also many changes to the road network due to destruction, flooding or blockages. Existing routing applications can only take these changed conditions into account with a delay of a week or longer. Official data is offered with long update cycles and is not homogeneous across national borders, and such update cycles are not sufficient for applications in crisis situations when first responders, materials and relief supplies need to reach their destination quickly.

This is where OpenStreetMap (OSM) can play to its strengths. Using the example of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria in 2023, the adjacent figure shows how hundreds of volunteers worked on changes to the road network and updated the OSM database within just a few hours. Due to its free availability, OSM data is already the first choice for map products and classic routing applications for many humanitarian organizations and companies.

In addition to the efficient collection and rapid provision of road data and its changes, there are other challenging aspects. Routing graphs, which form the mathematical basis for solving navigation tasks, must first be derived from the updated road data in a time-consuming step. The recalculation of the entire routing graph with global coverage can take up to a week of computing time despite the use of enormous resources, even though only a small part of the road network has actually changed.

Consequently, the challenges for “up-to-date” routing are to identify the changed parts of the road network promptly, to validate the quality of the changes in terms of plausibility and relevance, and to trigger an update of the routing graph only in these areas. The result can then be linked to the unchanged parts of the road network.

Goal

We propose a real-time monitoring system for the road network based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) and remote sensing data: OSM Road Monitor. The system processes all changes to the road network in OSM and evaluates them for errors like vandalism, change detection from RS data, impact on data quality, and their relevance for routing results. OSM Road Monitor is designed as a notification system where users can create customized monitoring jobs themselves. Users decide which region should be monitored, what type of changes to the road network should be taken into account and how often notifications should be sent. In addition to these basic parameters of the application, users can decide which specific monitoring reports are suitable for their use case.

A user of OSM Road Monitor is notified according to a defined time interval or as soon as relevant changes to the road network occur in OSM. The OSM Road Monitor uses change detection based on remote sensing data to detect and verify changes in the road network and models the effects of changes on the routing results. Depending on the selected monitoring report, the message is the starting point for further specific actions.

As part of the project, we aim to develop a prototype for dynamic routing. Using these applications, we would like to demonstrate that it is possible to make the up-to-dateness of OSM data usable for routing as well. The OSM Road Monitor thus closes the gap and shortens the time required for changes in OSM to become visible in routing applications within a few minutes.

Acknowledgment

This project is funded by Zentrales Innovationsprogramm Mittelstand (ZIM) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.