Alternative routes with more than two waypoints

In this short article we'll describe why it does not make sense to calculate alternative routes with more than two waypoints.

 

If you calculate a route with two waypoints the result consist of exactly 1 leg, which is in this simple case the complete route.

 

With more than 2 waypoints you have more than 1 leg, for instance 3 waypoints will give you 2 legs.

 

To get an alternative route for every leg would technically be not a big deal but the problem comes afterwards.

 

How do you want to combine the alternative routes from every leg?

 

This is a combinatorial problem to return alternative routes for the whole route as the amount of possible combination rises pretty quickly. 

Another downside to this is that calculating alternative routes takes a lot longer than using regular routing for each leg.

 

Furthermore in case of calculating alternative routes per leg, there is the risk to run into time-outs.

If you want to use more than two waypoints we recommend to split the route and create a request for every leg and calculate the alternative route from these results.