Open Source Routing Machine, or OSRM, is a routing software based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. OSRM can be used to find the fastest route between points, to compute time or distance matrices between set of points or to solve the traveling salesman problem.As maintainer of the osrm
R package I often find myself advising users to use their own instance of OSRM to enable them to send a large number of requests and not overload the demo server. In these cases I simply point to the Docker installation instructions in the project’s README file. These instructions may not be detailed enough to build an OSRM instance on a large area. OSRM needs a lot of RAM to prepare the road network for requests and using only these instructions will probably result in message like this one:
This problem is addressed in this issue on the OSRM GitHub repository. The suggested solution is to rent a temporary server. This is not the only solution, a modern computer with a rather classical hardware configuration can actually do the job.
In this post I’ll explain how to build a European-wide OSRM instance on a desktop computer. These explanations are, to a certain extent, also valid when using a remote server.