Route Packing: Geospatially-Accurate Visualization of Route Networks
This addresses the challenge of clear route network visualization for users in domains like transportation or logistics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of visualizing multiple routes on a map while preserving geospatial details, and found optimal visual parameters through a user study on route tracing performance.
We present route packing, a novel (geo)visualization technique for displaying several routes simultaneously on a geographic map while preserving the geospatial layout, identity, directionality, and volume of individual routes. The technique collects variable-width route lines side by side while minimizing crossings, encodes them with categorical colors, and decorates them with glyphs to show their directions. Furthermore, nodes representing sources and sinks use glyphs to indicate whether routes stop at the node or merely pass through it. We conducted a crowd-sourced user study investigating route tracing performance with road networks visualized using our route packing technique. Our findings highlight the visual parameters under which the technique yields optimal performance.