Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 1: Concepts and Solutions for Communications and Information Systems
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A more advanced dispatcher could, for research purposes or even in production,
if resources allow, start a number of parallel optimizations (each using a different
algorithm), taking the result of the fastest algorithm (and canceling the rest).
IX. Other components
Our route server also supports a few typical services, such as auto-complete
and geocoding, although its capabilities are not as advanced as in e.g. Google Maps.
(As Insigma puts stress on innovation, it is not a goal to repeat features that are
already widely available on the market.) Perhaps a novel idea is the option to specify
routing points (start, destination, intermediates) in the form of a well-known location
types (drugstore, hospital, etc.), with a type denoting all points of this type
located within a considered area.
Unfortunately, during the development we encountered a number of problems
related to OSM (and the quality of open-source data). These problems include
incomplete OSM map content for tested area, some errors and “mess” in the data
(e.g., incorrect city borders, inconsistent naming), and, finally, poor performance
(at least on a budget PC machines), which enforced pre-caching results (e.g., a list
of cities in Poland for auto-completion) in files. A real-world deployment of our
service would definitely require better map data.
X. The Client
The primary task of a client application is to generate a request for server and
display its response (a route with additional information). In future, we plan to
extend its functionality with GPS-based position tracking and route recalculation
during the drive.
The client is implemented in JavaScript and employs a number of related
technologies:
• User interface is built using jQuery Mobile [7], a popular library optimized
for mobile web browsers;
• Map display is based on OpenLayers [9];
• Communication with server utilizes Web Services with JSON as data encoding
format; a high-level Ajax-based API has been developed for this
purpose;
• Finally, the geolocation API [5], provided by a browser (see [6] for an example),
is required for location tracking (in case of a mobile terminal).
The client has been tested on a PC (with Google Chrome or Firefox) and
a mobile terminal (a Samsung tablet with Android 3.1 OS, running its default web
browser – see Fig. 4). Performance and functionality are comparable in both cases.