Thank you, Poutnik! I'm very grateful to understand this better, and I'm sure others are too.
Interpreting Harry's results, I'm no longer thinking "acceptable routes are found even when the optimum is no longer guaranteed" but (eg. for hc=1.2) "it would take a very unusual route and section of map for the optimal route not to be found" (that is, before the heuristic overestimates the cost function of the optimal route). These are different. But it remains the case that the only absolute guarantee that the optimal route will be found is hc=1.0. I think I have created car and pedestrian profiles that use a customised routing.xml with hc=1.0 but I have yet to find a route that gives different results to OsmAnd 3.6.3's current values (1.5 for car, 1.2 for pedestrian). (Harry - had you noticed that the standard values are now this high?) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OsmAnd" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to osmand+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osmand/26cf1565-353e-4c40-9fd0-6cec237d1683%40googlegroups.com.