March 2024 Platform Release Notes

HERE Tour Planning

This release marks a significant milestone, introducing a range of features that support various essential use cases.

• Optional start/end location in vehicle shift:
  This feature introduces a flexible approach to vehicle shift management, enabling you to omit specifying the exact start and/or end location within a shift. This means that a tour can commence or conclude at any designated stop.
  This feature proves useful in scenarios where fleet operators collaborate with external fleet suppliers. In such instances, operators can create a tour without having to determine the precise location the supplier’s fleet will initiate or conclude the tour. Consequently, the tour is generated to include all specified tasks, irrespective of fixed start or end locations.
  In specific services, such as school bus or employee pickup operations, the dispatcher anticipates the tour to initiate from the first pickup. The solver intelligently determines the optimal starting point of the tour, ensuring overall efficiency. Learn more about this feature in this tutorial.
• Limiting the time spent in the vehicle:
  In this feature, dispatchers gain the ability to individually define the permissible job duration for each vehicle. This customization should prove valuable for such operations as food delivery and people transport, allowing for precise control over job timelines. For example, in a food delivery scenario, a dispatcher can now enforce specific constraints, ensuring that the total duration from departing the pickup location to arriving at the delivery destination remains under the predefined limit, e.g. 30 minutes.
• Mixed loading restrictions:
  Mixed load restrictions are constraints that prevent certain types of goods from being loaded together on the same trip. For example, last-mile delivery scenarios often involve a variety of goods being delivered to multiple locations, like residential addresses, businesses, or pickup points. These goods might have specific requirements such as size, weight, fragility, temperature sensitivity, hazardous classification, or other special handling needs, which can exclude certain types from being transported together. Tour planning allows to definition of these restrictions at the whole tour level or even at the sub-tour level. Learn more about this feature in this tutorial.
• Support for job groups:
  This functionality allows the dispatcher to efficiently organize tours, ensuring consecutive delivery of all jobs within a designated group before addressing other tasks, whether standalone or part of a different group. This proves particularly advantageous when the dispatcher intends for the driver to complete all tasks in a specific area in one continuous effort, minimizing unnecessary back-and-forth movements. With this feature, a single vehicle can handle all jobs within a designated group. Learn more about this feature in this tutorial.
• [ALPHA] Minimum stops per shift:
  In certain scenarios, the dispatcher may prefer to deploy a vehicle only if there is a minimum number of stops to be served. This scenario is common in cases where companies engage third-party drivers, aiming for cost-effectiveness by ensuring that the vehicle undertakes a specified minimum number of stops. If the available jobs fall below this threshold, the vehicle remains unused, preventing the assignment of the vehicle, which might leave some jobs unassigned.
• [ALPHA] Vehicle rest times: 
  This feature allows for the configuration of explicit intervals during which a vehicle must rest, ensuring that drivers adhere to prescribed rest periods. It is an important aspect in compliance with regulations and safety standards, as it helps prevent driver fatigue and facilitates responsible shift scheduling. The option to specify either rest times or breaks provides adaptability to different regulatory requirements or organizational policies regarding the scheduling of downtime for drivers during their shifts.

In addition, there are several new tutorials now available to facilitate the user’s understanding of how to use the Tour Planning API for efficient vehicle routing. For more information, see:

• Tour planning glossary
• VRP With Cost Optimizations

HERE SDK 4.17.3.0

HERE SDK 4.17.3.0 for iOS, Android and Flutter is a minor release for the 4.17 code line with a lot of bugfixes and improvements based on customer feedback. We also added some new features for this release, for example:

• Navigation: Added new RailwayCrossingWarning that informs on upcoming railway crossings.
• Navigation: Added EventTextDelegate to expose extra information regarding maneuvers and speed camera warning text notifications.
• Navigation: Added intersection name in Japanese maneuver notification in Japan.
• Search: Added a closed-alpha feature SearchOptions.highDensityEncodingEnabled. Enabling high density encoding allows input parameters of type GeoCorridor to be encoded with higher density of coordinates in SearchEngine requests.
• Search: Added CategoryQuery.Area constructor that takes GeoCorridor and GeoCoordinates as parameters.
• Introduced visual improvements for the roads in a hybrid scheme on a zoom-in level. Now transparent roads are displayed without round cap artifacts at the intersection of road segments.
• MapLoader: Added downloadArea() to MapDownloader for specified custom region downloading via GeoPolygon .

Take a look at the latest release notes for your edition and platform to find out more details.

HERE Map Content v2

 The following dataset enhancements and new features were implemented:

• All layer names and descriptions are shortened and more reflective of the content published
• Layer tags have changed to explicate layer metadata such as 
  • map source ( e.g. "source:HERE" )
  • status ( e.g. "status:deprecated" )
  • feature published ( e.g. "feature:topology" )
• Alignment to HERE content portfolio 
  • Toll Cost ( related to C02 emission classes )
  • Truck Attributes ( preferred road type )
• Inclusion of additional glTF flavors for 3D Landmarks* 

*Note these content layers are in a separate catalog, please consult your Account or Technical Support representative for further details.

HERE Routing

The latest release adds this new functionality for routing:

• Allow to path-through display locations for waypoints. Waypoints previously only allowed to use the navigate-to location. With the route response it was very tedious to actually add the display location of the waypoint in the route overview/navigation view as connection to the place was lost. To make things easier, you can now pass the display location as a waypoint parameter and get it back in the routing response, thus making building a good UI much easier.

HERE Maps API for JavaScript

The new version 3.1.53.0 of the HERE Web SDK - Maps API for JavaScript enables an easy way to highlight environmental and congestion zones based on vector rendering. 

Additionally, it introduces a new base map style to support the transportation and logistics use case. This dedicated logistics style highlighting truck toll roads, logistics facilities, industrial zones, states borders, motorway exists, numbers and names, is now available based on vector rendering.
The map style can be further customized with the HERE Style Editor (https://platform.here.com/style-editor/).

HERE Map Content v2

Layer deprecation notice

Please be aware that the following layers are deprecated:

• Places for HERE Essential Map (layer ID here-places-essential-map)
• Transport Service Locations (layer ID here-truck-service-locations)
• Fueling Stations (layer ID here-fueling-stations)

Instead, consumers of these layers are advised to switch to the Places layer (layer ID here-places) which will start publishing all applicable attributes instead.

The deprecated layers will remain accessible, but will not be updated anymore as of Q3 2024.

The deprecated layers will be physically removed from the catalog as of Q4 2024.

All 3 layers have already been tagged as deprecated ("status:deprecated").

Furthermore, the following layer will be put to maintenance mode:

• Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (layer ID electric-vehicle-charging-stations )

Instead, consumers of this layer are advised to switch to the Electric Vehicle Charging Locations layer (layer ID electric-vehicle-charging-locations) which contains the latest EV attributes according to industry standard OCPI. 

The deprecated layer will remain accessible, but will only receive content updates – no feature updates.

The layer has already been tagged as deprecated ("status:deprecated").

The removal of the deprecated layer is planned for Q2 2025.