Introduction

Routing has become commonplace on navigation devices for road networks across the world. If you want to know how to drive from point A to point B, simply enter the start address and end address into your navigation software and it will calculate the shortest route for you in seconds.

Here's a scenario you may come across: Route me to Prof. Dr. Smith's office in the Geography Department for my meeting at any university anywhere. Hmm, sorry, there's no routing network available on my navigation software. This is a reminder for you to not to forget to ask for directions on campus for your meeting location.

This chapter is all about routing and, specifically, routing inside large building complexes from office A33, first floor in building E01 to office B55, sixth floor in building P7.

We will explore the powerful routing capabilities of pgRouting, an extension of PostgreSQL. With pgRouting, we can calculate the shortest path using either the Dijkstra, A*, and/or K shortest path algorithms...