openrouteservice
LogisticsPlan routes for cars, heavy vehicles, bikes, walking, hiking, and wheelchair users with openrouteservice, built on OpenStreetMap. Agents compute realistic travel times and service areas for dispatch and scheduling.
What This Integration Enables
Most routing APIs treat the road network as one graph with modifiers bolted on. openrouteservice treats it as several networks, and the practical consequence shows up the first time you route something other than a car. The profile list is Car, Heavy Vehicle, Bike in regular, road, mountain and electric variants, Walking, Hiking and Wheelchair, and each one routes on its own street network with its own restrictions. Two of those are more than a checkbox. The Heavy Vehicle profile applies road restrictions by vehicle category, with Heavy Goods Vehicle, Bus, Agricultural, Delivery, Forestry and Goods as the categories, which is the difference between a route a truck may legally take and a route a car may take. The Wheelchair profile is a real accessibility capability rather than a walking route with a note attached, and Search Points Of Interest can filter places by their OpenStreetMap wheelchair tag, so an accessible route can end at an accessible destination.
It is also open source, running on OpenStreetMap data, which is the honest reason a lot of teams pick it: the underlying data is inspectable and correctable by the people who know the ground, and the licensing does not put your route geometry behind a redistribution restriction. Beyond directions, the connector covers isochrones that return reachable-area polygons with optional area, reachability score and population inside each band, many-to-many distance matrices, worldwide geocoding through Pelias in free-text, structured and reverse forms, SRTM terrain elevation for points and lines, point of interest search and category statistics, coordinate snapping to clean GPS traces, and a full vehicle routing solver in Optimize Vehicle Routes. That last one honours start and end depots, load capacities, skills, time windows, service durations and per-vehicle limits, and returns the jobs it could not serve rather than quietly dropping them. Under Orchestration as a Service, that unserved list is the useful output, because it is the part a person needs to decide about.
Without FlowRunner
With FlowRunner
Use Case Scenarios
Planning a Day's Rounds Across a Mixed Fleet
Overnight orders are released with delivery windows and item weights. The agent geocodes each stop with Search Structured Address, keeping street, locality, postal code and country in separate fields so the parser is not guessing at a single string, then runs Snap Coordinates To Road for the relevant profile to catch any stop that has no routable edge nearby. Optimize Vehicle Routes takes the surviving jobs and the fleet, each vehicle declaring its depot, capacity, skills and working hours, and returns an ordered route per vehicle with arrival times and load, plus the jobs that could not be served. The unserved jobs and any route that breaches a promised window go to the planner as a shortlist. The rest of the plan is already done.
Catchment Analysis Before Committing to a Site
A property shortlist arrives for a new depot or clinic. For each candidate the agent calls Get Isochrones with a range in travel time and an interval, producing nested bands of what is reachable in ten, twenty and thirty minutes, and requests the optional attributes so each band comes back with its area, a reachability score and the total population inside it. Get Point Of Interest Statistics then profiles the amenity mix around each candidate by category group instead of listing every place, and Get Distance Matrix ranks the candidates by real drive time from the existing network rather than by map distance. The comparison lands in a Google Sheets tab with a rendered polygon per site. The property decision is still a human one, but it stops being an argument about which map looks better.
Routing That Assumes Nothing About the Traveller
A community transport or patient logistics flow books journeys for people whose mobility varies. Rather than routing everyone as a pedestrian and adding a caveat, the agent selects the profile that matches the traveller: Walking, Hiking or Wheelchair, with Steps available as an avoid feature for cycling, walking and wheelchair profiles. Search Points Of Interest along the buffered route path filters by wheelchair access values of Yes, Limited, No or Designated, so a suggested stop for a break is filtered on the same basis the route was planned on. Get Directions returns turn-by-turn instructions and per-segment extras including surface, way type and steepness, and Export Route As GPX hands the finished route to a device or a file. The person receives a route planned for how they actually travel.
Human-in-Loop Highlight
The Heavy Vehicle profile applies the road restrictions OpenStreetMap records for a vehicle category, and Vehicle Type selects which category: Heavy Goods Vehicle, Bus, Agricultural, Delivery, Forestry or Goods. Read that precisely, because it is where the risk lives. The route is legal for a class of vehicle. It is not a statement about the height of the specific truck that got assigned this morning, or what is loaded on it today. A route computed under one category and driven by a vehicle that does not match it ends at a low bridge or a weight-limited lane, and there is no undo for a truck that is already under the bridge. So the agent does not push an optimised plan straight to drivers. It posts the plan to the transport planner with the profile and vehicle type each route was computed under, alongside the registration assigned to it and any job Optimize Vehicle Routes returned as unserved: "Plan for [date]. [N] routes. Route 3 computed as Heavy Vehicle / Heavy Goods Vehicle, assigned to [registration]. [M] jobs unassigned: [list]. Confirm the vehicle assignments, or send back for replanning?" That confirmation is the digital andon cord on a plan that otherwise looks finished, and it costs a planner a minute against a class of failure that costs a day.
Agent Capabilities
15 actionsDirections and Routing
3- Get Directions Calculates a route between two or more waypoints for a chosen mode of transport, returning distance, duration, turn-by-turn instructions and route geometry. Supports up to 50 waypoints, avoidance of highways, toll roads, ferries, fords and steps, border and country avoidance, heavy-vehicle restrictions, elevation data, and per-segment extras such as surface, way type and steepness. Results come back as GeoJSON or as JSON with an encoded polyline.
- Export Route As GPX Calculates a route between two or more waypoints and returns it as a GPX track, the XML exchange format understood by most GPS devices, outdoor apps and mapping tools. Use it when the route has to be handed to a device or a file rather than processed field by field inside the flow.
- Plan Round Trip Generates a circular route that starts and ends at the same point and approximates a requested total length, which is how a training run, a bike loop or a scenic walk is planned. The shape is controlled by the number of intermediate points and by an optional seed that changes the overall direction of the loop.
Reachability and Matrices
2- Get Isochrones Calculates reachability areas around one or more locations and returns them as GeoJSON polygons. Ranges can be travel time in seconds or travel distance, and a single range plus an interval produces nested bands. Optional attributes add the polygon area, a reachability score and the total population inside each band, and intersections between the areas of several locations can be returned as separate features.
- Get Distance Matrix Calculates travel durations and distances between many locations at once, as one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. Supply a single list of locations and optionally restrict which act as sources and which as destinations by zero-based index. This is the efficient way to rank branches by drive time, assign the nearest technician or feed a routing optimisation.
Geocoding
4- Search Address Resolves a free-text place name, street address or postal code into coordinates using the global Pelias geocoder. Returns ranked GeoJSON features with the full administrative hierarchy from street up to country, a confidence score and a match type. Results can be focused around a point, constrained to a country, rectangle or circle, and restricted to particular data sources or administrative layers.
- Autocomplete Address Suggests matching places for a partial search term, built for type-ahead inputs where the user is still typing. Returns the same ranked GeoJSON features as a full address search, but tolerates incomplete input and responds faster. Suggestions can be biased towards a point and constrained by country, rectangle, data source or administrative layer.
- Search Structured Address Geocodes an address whose parts are already separated into fields such as street, locality, postal code and country, instead of one free-text string. Keeping the fields apart avoids the ambiguity of full-text parsing and generally produces more accurate matches for data arriving from forms, CRM records or address databases. At least one field must be supplied.
- Reverse Geocode Coordinates Converts a coordinate pair into the nearest human-readable addresses and administrative areas, returning ranked GeoJSON features ordered by distance from the point, each with street, postal code and the full hierarchy up to country. The search radius widens or tightens the lookup, and the layer filter asks specifically for an address, a street or the enclosing locality.
Elevation
2- Get Point Elevation Returns terrain elevation in meters above sea level for a single coordinate pair, using the SRTM v4.1 digital elevation model. The elevation is appended as the third value of the coordinate, so the result feeds straight into any tool that understands three-dimensional GeoJSON.
- Get Line Elevation Enriches a sequence of coordinates with terrain elevation from the same model, which is how an elevation profile is built for a track, a route geometry or a planned trail. Every coordinate comes back with a third value holding its height in meters, either as a GeoJSON LineString, a plain coordinate list or an encoded polyline.
Points of Interest
2- Search Points Of Interest Finds OpenStreetMap points of interest inside or around a geometry and returns them as GeoJSON features with categories, distance and OpenStreetMap tags. The search area can be a buffered point, a buffered path along a route, or a bounding box. Results can be narrowed by category group, individual category, name, wheelchair accessibility and whether a fee applies.
- Get Point Of Interest Statistics Counts the OpenStreetMap points of interest inside or around a geometry and returns totals grouped by category and category group instead of the individual places. Use it to profile a neighbourhood, compare the amenity mix of candidate sites, or measure how well an area is served without paging through every feature.
Snapping and Optimisation
2- Snap Coordinates To Road Moves raw coordinates onto the nearest routable road segment for the selected mode of transport, returning the snapped position, the street name and how far the point was moved. Use it to clean GPS traces or user-picked pins before routing. Points with no routable edge inside the search radius come back as null in the same order as the input, so a bad stop is visible rather than silently relocated.
- Optimize Vehicle Routes Solves a vehicle routing problem by assigning jobs to a fleet and ordering each vehicle's stops to minimise total cost. Honours vehicle start and end depots, load capacities, skills, time windows, service durations and per-vehicle limits on tasks, travel time and distance. Returns the planned route for every vehicle with arrival times and load, plus any jobs that could not be served.
Frequently Asked Questions
What can FlowRunner do with openrouteservice?
FlowRunner agents can run Get Directions, Export Route As GPX, and Plan Round Trip in openrouteservice, plus 12 more actions.
Does connecting openrouteservice to FlowRunner require OAuth?
No. openrouteservice connects to FlowRunner with an API key, no OAuth flow required.
Can openrouteservice trigger a FlowRunner workflow automatically?
openrouteservice doesn't currently expose triggers in FlowRunner. It connects as an action step inside workflows started by another trigger.
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