Construction of a topographical road graph for bicycle tour routes

In this paper, we describe an algorithmic procedure for transforming traditional road map data into a novel topographical road graph for generating customized multi-day bicycle routes. To that end, we are using polyline data from the OpenStreetMap (OSM), 1/3-arc second resolution elevation data from a Digital Elevation Model provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, and a model of perceived exertion (PE) for bicyclists of different levels of expertise. Our topographical road graph allows for the calculation of the PE over any sequence of road segments (a path) for bicyclists of different levels of expertise and serves as input for generating paths of minimal PE. Our objective is to enable generation of multi-day bicycle tours of minimal PE for cyclists of different levels of expertise.