How do maps apps (Waze, Google maps, etc) actually calculate best routes and time for distance travelled? Is it all from tracking?
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It’s more or less the same technology that helps get your internet traffic from your computer to Reddit’s servers. It’s a routing protocol.
If they use traffic data, all they’re doing is calculating the “cost” of taking a particular stretch of road. After that, you take those costs and throw them into a routing algorithm. The idea of a routing algorithm is that it keeps reaching out from the road that has the lowest cost.
The particular algorithm (or variation of) that maps use will also add a metric that is basically a measure of “Are we actually getting closer to your target?”. This keeps the rather open routing problem focused on getting to one destination. Here’s a video with a good example on it.
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