Routing

The scheduling of a route or itinerary of people, freight, energy, data, etc., optimizing on some criteria such as time or cost. Depending on the resource being routed, routing can be deeply political, especially when ensuring that a route goes through or avoids a particular place.

Geospatial routing and navigation across transportation networks was first enabled by computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1956. Dijkstra's algorithm is an algorithm for finding the shortest paths between nodes in a weighted graph, which may represent, for example, road networks.

(Modified from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm)

Japanese automakers were the first to commercially sell navigation systems in the early 1980s, while companies like NavTeq (now called HERE) and TomTom were providing the proprietary street data. Now routing for navigation purposes is available to every smartphone user on the planet. It is now quite common to have real-time traffic data change the weights put on different edges of the graph used by the routing/navigation engines.