The best way to load an openstreetmap .osm in a docker-container
My intentions:
Actually, I intend to:
- implement vehicles as containers
- simulate/move these containers on the .osm maps-based roads
My viewpoint about the problem:
I have loaded the XML-based .osm file and processed it in python using xml.dom. But I am not satisfied with the performance of loading the .osm file because later on, I will have to add/create more vehicles as containers that will be simulated onto the same road.
Suggestions needed: This is my first time to solve a problem related to maps. In fact, I need suggestions on how to proceed by keeping in mind, the performance/efficiency, with this set of requirements. Suggestions in terms of implementation will be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Simulating lots of vehicles by running lots of docker containers in parallel might work I suppose. Maybeyou're initialising the same image with different start locations etc passed in as ENV vars? As a practical way of doing agent simulations this sounds a bit over-engineered to me, but as an interesting docker experiment it might make sense.
Maybe you'll need a central thing for holding and sharing the state (positions of other vehicles) and serving that back to the multiple agents.
The challenge of loading an .osm file into some sort of database or internal map representation doesn't seem like the hardest part, and because it may be done once on initialisation and imagine it's not the most performance critical part of this.
I'm thinking you'll probably want to do "routing" through the road network (taking account of one ways etc?), giving your agents a purposeful path to follow to a destination. This will get more complicated if you want to model interactions with other agents e.g. you might want to model getting stuck in traffic because other agents are going the same way, and even decisions to re-route because of traffic, so you may want quite a flexible routing system, perhaps self-coded.
But there's lots of open source routing systems which work with OSM data, to at least draw inspiration from. See this list: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#Developers
Popular choices like OSRM are designed to scale up to country size or even global openstreetmap data, but I imagine that's overkill for you (you're probably looking at simulating within a city road network?). Even so. Probably easy enough to get working in a docker container.
Or you might find something lightweight like the code of the JOSM routing plugin easier to embed in your docker image and customize (although I see that's using a library called "JGraphT")
Then working backwards from a calculated route you can calculate interpolated steps along that path which will allow you to make your simulated agents take a step on each iteration (simulated movement)