Idea: a way to publish planned road closures as part of a vehicle routing service. One way to do this would be to include StartDate and EndDate attributes on the routing barrier datasets (point, line or polygon) and these attributes would then be used by the routing service to determine when a barrier is active on the road network. It might also be possible to do something similar via attributes on road segments in the routing network; however this would require splitting long segments if the closure only affects a subsection -- so the barrier approach has an advantage in this respect.
Rationale:
Every summer, municipalities have planned road maintenance projects that requires complete road closures. The timing of this work is known weeks if not months in advance of the work. It is possible to pass road barrier locations (e.g., as xy point locations) from the caller application when making a request to the routing service. The disadvantage of this approach is this requires customization on the caller applications, which the team responsible for the vehicle routing service may have no control over (e.g., its a 3rd party software that is consuming the routing service); and if there is more than one application that calls the vehicle routing service this will require separate customization on each application instead of just managing this in one place within the routing service itself; it also may put the onus on the end user to manage road closures and this in some cases (such as Emergency Services) is inappropriate.
