We have been trying to use the “avoid” function and it just isn’t suitable simply closing junctions. If we are calculating a route where an 11’6” bridge is halfway down the road, the “avoid” should stop the route travelling down that section of the road, but if we set the “avoid” on the next or previous junction, the route fails because this closes alternative roads as well. (because all four roads leading to the junction are made impassable)

The aim, for us, is that the users of our transport system can manually record the location of road restrictions and even areas to avoid at certain times of day, these avoidance areas can then be pre-loaded prior to any software route calculation, making any route much more accurate.

Currently any route is just a “best guess”. Many of our customers have complained about closed roads being used and one-way streets being used the wrong way. While I fully understand that Microsoft cannot do anything about the map data, as a developer I don’t accept the current limitation of the software cannot be removed. All that’s required is that avoidance areas are not ignored when in the middle of a road section.

Have a look at my attached screenshots:-


Figure 1 shows the road and route. As you can see the middle of the road section has a height restriction (low bridge).


Figure 2 shows the addition of an “avoid” area, which does nothing to change the route.


Figure 3 shows what happens if the avoid area is moved to enclose the next or previous road junction. The route fails.


Figure 4 shows what we would like to happen. (I had to add an extra stop on the route to mock this up).

If the issue is that you can only close junctions, then surely can you not select which direction, out of the four, is closed when adding the avoid area to the junction?

Does anybody have any idea how to work around this?

We are using Visual Basic 6.0 and MapPoint 2004 Europe.

EDIT: Rik Temnik from Microsoft has come back to me this afternoon to say that there is NO workaround currently. Nor will the next release of MapPoint (2005?) have a fix either. He is hopeful that a more sophisticated avoid function will be engineer into the next development cycle.


Regards

Anthony Hunt
Senior Technical Specialist
Kappa Lambda Squared Limited (www.kl2.com)
Erskine House, 53 London Road, Maidstone, Kent. ME16 8JH
+44 (0)1622 670095
+44 (0)1622 200119 Fax

Hello i have got the same problem. I need to avoid my route to go trough a particular road but i don't want to avoid the crossroads between this road and other roads.
I couldn't find any solution at the moment. I can't think about a routine that can "decide" where to add a waypoint as you did in your example.

Would it be so hard for ms-developers to patch the avoid function, to let it be used even in the middle of roads? Maybe it depends on the engine and it's more complicated than i suppose..

But.. suppose that we can access the database of mappoint and we can change the road type. It would be possible to temporarly change that arc of the road to a boat path (crazy but maybe the engine doesn't check if a boat path is on the sea (why should?)), then we could change the preferences to avoid boats, and calculate.. it would avoid that exact arc of road..
We could even write a routine to do this automatically at the intersection of avoided shapes and roads. Maybe there is just a byte to write to change that road's arc type.

The big problem is accessing the mappoint database in the right point after the change. Suggestions and help on the mappoint db accessibility (maybe using third parts' software/ocx) are appreciated.


[quote="Anthony_Hunt"]We have been trying to use the “avoid” function
and it just isn’t suitable simply closing junctions. If we are calculating a route where an 11’6” bridge is halfway down the road, the “avoid” should stop the route travelling down that section of the road, but if we set the “avoid” on the next or previous junction, the route fails because this closes alternative roads as well. (because all four roads leading to the junction are made impassable)

>The big problem is accessing the mappoint database in the right point <after the change. Suggestions and help on the mappoint db accessibility

I wrote it wrong..
The big problem is accessing the mappoints database in the right point _and change it_

bye