What is OSRM?

OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) is an open-source routing engine designed to calculate routes between locations using road-network data from OpenStreetMap (OSM).

OSRM can calculate a road-based route and return information such as:

• Route geometry — the actual path to follow
• Distance — how far the route is
• Duration — estimated travel time
• Turn-by-turn route information — depending on the API/service used

Kathmandu → Lalitpur
       ↓
     OSRM
       ↓
Road Route
Distance: 8.4 km
Duration: ~25 min

problems before choosing the osrm

While working on a map-based application, I needed to calculate routes between two different locations. At first, it seemed simple: provide a starting coordinate and a destination coordinate, and get a route between them.

But in practice, several challenges appeared:

• Coordinates alone don't provide a road route ,latitude and longitude only tell us where two points are located.
• Straight-line distance isn't useful for navigation ,the actual route needs to follow available roads.
• We needed distance and estimated travel time along with the route.
• The routing system needed real road data, including roads and their connections.
• Depending entirely on external routing APIs can introduce API limits, network dependency, and usage restrictions.
• More control was needed over the routing service, especially when working with a larger number of routing requests

So the actual problem was:

How can we calculate reliable, road-based routes between two coordinates using real-world road data, while having control over the routing service?

This led me to OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine).