Workshop on Centrality Indicators in Road Network Analysis: from concept to implementation

Centrality Indicators in Road Network Analysis: from concept to implementation

GIScience Conference, Leeds, UK, September 12, 2023

Centrality indicators are used to identify important nodes or edges in graph networks. Applied to road networks these indicators can for example be used to model traffic speed or identify critical roads to support disaster preparedness. Still, open challenges remain on how the geographical context of road networks (e.g. road type, spatio-temporal travel patterns) should be integrated and how to efficiently calculate centrality indicators for such complex networks.

This workshop will provide a platform to discuss and learn about centrality indicators both at a conceptual as well as a technical implementation level. In addition, hands-on sessions on how to calculate centrality indicators using openrouteservice will be offered by the organisers to interested participants.

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Workshop Format

The workshop will be done in a “open-space” format, where participants themselves suggest topics and decide on the agenda. This enables participants to adapt the workshop according to their interests and encourages exchange between participants to start new research collaborations. An introduction to the “open space” method will be given at the beginning of the workshop.

Discussion topics for the session will be proposed and selected by the participants. Possible topics may be but are not limited to:

In addition, practical hands-on sessions will be offered by organisers for interested participants:

Preliminary program

Part 1: Focus on conceptual perspective

09:00 – 09:30: Welcome and introduction round
09:30 – 09:40: Introduction to the “open space” format
09:40 – 10:00: Collection of discussion topics and agenda planning: focus on conceptual topics
10:00 – 11:30: Open space sessions (incl. coffee breaks)
11:30 – 12:00: Group presentation of session results

LUNCH BREAK

Part 2: Focus on technical perspective

13:00 – 13:30: Collection of topics/activities and agenda planning: further discussions, collaborative activities inspired by previous discussions, hands-on session on openrouteservice
13:30 – 15:30: Open space sessions (incl. coffee breaks)
15:30 – 16:00: Group presentation of session results

Times are preliminary and will be adapted to the conference schedule.

Registration

Conference attendees interested in participating in the workshop can sign up for the workshop during registration for the conference. If there are still capacities, joining on the day of the workshop is possible, too. The workshop is limited to 20 people.

Participation in the hands-on tutorials requires participants to bring their own laptop and installing the required software prior to the workshop. Installation instructions will be sent out at least two weeks before the conference.

Workshop material

Workshop organisers

Christina Ludwig1,2
Marcel Reinmuth2
Adam Rousell2
Alexander Zipf1,2

1 GIScience Research Group, Institut of Geography, Heidelberg University, Germany
2 Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) gGmbH at Heidelberg University, Germany

HeiGIT and the GIScience Research Group work closely together with the aim of transferring fundamental research in geoinformatics to practical applications. Within this collaboration we have performed road network analyses in the context of disaster preparedness (Petricola et al., 2022), pedestrian and bike routing (Ludwig et al., 2021, Hatfield et al., 2022) and traffic modelling (Zia et al., 2022). All of these studies used openrouteservice, an open-source routing service based on OpenStreetMap data, which is developed and provided as a public service by HeiGIT gGmbH.

References