Building a map simulation system

I'm currently working on a project that simulates a map with routes on it that allows users to decide their destination, and the system will calculate the shortest path to it. The map should receives real-time traffic data in which the traffic flow changes along the way while the vehicle is travelling. When the traffic flow ch开发者_StackOverflow中文版anges, the system will then calculate another shortest path by avoiding the traffic.

How exactly should I store the details of the routes in the database? I was thinking about: longitude, latitude, distance of the route, width, I'm not too sure if I'm doing it correctly.

Thank you for your attention.

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What version of SQL Server are you using? If you are using SQL Server 2008 you can simply store the data is a column which uses the geography data type which will allow you to store the points of the route needed as true lan/long. Then you can retreive the stored route and simply display it.

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You will almost certainly want to check some of the literature on GIS data structures, especially ways of modelling networks. Routes are usually made up of a number of sub-routes and so on down until you get to a road segment from one junction to another. What your proposed storage scheme omits entirely is any notions of connectivity between segments and sub-routes. There's a lot of good work in Open GIS for data standards -- I'm not familiar with it but it is probably a good place to start Googling.

I guess you might be intending to model each different route as a different polyline -- but if you are how will you deal with routes which are coincident over some sub-route ?