Developing a mobile phone GIS-based application to assist in automobile least cost route planning :a case study of the City of Johannesburg municipal area

Abstract

The use of cellular phones pervades most technological aspects in daily life. More than 80% of users use their mobile phones for some form of navigation. The objective of this project was to develop a standard automobile routing application for Android mobile phones. The application development process was constrained to a minimal financial budget. This was the main parameter that informed the use of open source application development software and mapping data service providers. The purpose of the routing application is to allow the user to choose the type of routing preferred between shortest path or fastest time. The study area was focused on the City of Johannesburg. OpenStreetMaps has an updated and comprehensive road network which can be relied on for the City of Johannesburg. The application was created for an Android operating system since this is the more common smart mobile phone operating system. The application was built in Android Studio using the Mapbox plugin which is focused on open street routing and pulls from the Open Street Routing Machine for the actual route. The application allows for most standard features such as traffic flow information, geolocation and turn-by-turn directions.