RouteScape: A Visual Analytics System for Routing in Degraded Spatial Networks

Road networks in disaster zones and conflict-affected cities arefundamentally uncertain: edges may be unmapped, outdated, or activelycontrolled by armed actors. Yet standard routing tools render everyedge identically, hiding this uncertainty from those who need it most.RouteScape makes routing uncertainty a first-class visual objectvia two novel primitives: (1) the confidence-weighted route band,which encodes per-edge OSM reliability through line width and opacity,giving an immediate signal about which segments are trustworthy versusguesses built on stale data; and (2) the routing confidencehorizon, a radial visualization exposing directional asymmetries inrouting reliability invisible to any existing interface. Beyond crisisresponse, both primitives apply to everyday navigation in data-sparseregions where rural commuters, delivery fleets, and field workersdepend on roads OSM has not revisited in years. TheAlgorithmic Resilience Score (ARS) grounds the systemempirically, validating that OSM edge confidence predicts routingstability under real-world degradation (mean r = 0.63 across threenetworks).