November 2023 Platform Release Notes

HERE SDK 4.16.2.0

We are pleased to announce the availability of our minor release 4.16.2.0 of the HERE SDK for iOS, Android and Flutter.

The HERE SDK product family enables you to build powerful map applications based on the latest data from the HERE platform incorporating microservices and highly modularized components.

This is a new release of our 4.16 code line which we will extend and support during the next quarter. We also added some new features, for example:

• Added CurrentSituationLaneAssistanceViewListener to receive lane based information on the access, type and direction.
• Carto: Show traffic road closure icon, when road is closed; independent of incident type.
• Enabled Political View Model for Offline Map in the HERE SDK. Now, already downloaded offline maps will not be removed automatically when political view is changed.
• Added MapContentSettings.setTrafficRefreshPeriod() to change the traffic refresh period and resetTrafficRefreshPeriod() to reset the applied traffic refresh period.
   
• Added support for food type filtering within Search.
• Add support for payload capacity specification for truck routing calculation and notice details for ViolatedRestriction.
• Support to enable/disable position extrapolation for tracking mode in the VisualNavigator.
• Added maneuverNotificationOptions.directionInformationUsageForActionNotificationOption to optionally include direction information in voice notifications.

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

HERE Tour planning

We are thrilled to announce the latest updates to our Tour Planning (VRP) Solver Product, designed to enhance your experience and support a broader range of use cases while ensuring the most practical and efficient tours possible.

Here's what's new:

1. Vehicle speed cap: Customers can now set a speed limit for their vehicle profiles, introducing a valuable feature that provides greater control over the speed constraints. Dispatchers can now enforce speed limits, even on roads where higher speeds are allowed, enhancing safety. This feature is implemented through the "speedCap" parameter, which can be defined at the fleet profile level.
2. Traffic disabled mode: We've introduced a new traffic-disabled mode for vehicle profiles. By default, traffic is considered in tour planning, but now dispatchers have the option to completely disable traffic data for selected vehicle profiles. When traffic is disabled, all traffic information, including long-term closures, is disregarded. This feature is especially valuable in situations such as long-term, repeatable tours, or when drivers are comfortable with minor adjustments like walking or finding alternative routes to navigate around road closures.
3. Increased limit for tasks: We've made significant enhancements to our core algorithms, resulting in a major boost to tour planning performance. So, we are able to double the limits for the async endpoint, increasing it from 3000 tasks to 6000 tasks. This means that dispatchers can now optimize a larger number of tasks in a single request, providing even greater efficiency and flexibility.

Refer to Tour planning documentation and tutorials to learn more about more features and capabilities.

HERE Geocoding and Search API

Increase efficiency of delivery and pick-ups by accurately identifying and locating specific locations such as units and buildings.

We are pleased to announce the first release of Micro Point Address support in the Geocoder. Micro Point Addresses add a level of precision to Point Addresses and their locations. For businesses and services like ride-sharing, food delivery, and emergency services, micro point addresses enable faster and more efficient routing to exact destinations.

• Micro Point Address (MPA) is always connected to a parent Point Address
• MPA further complements an existing street-level Point Address with:
  • Building Unit Name
  • Floor or level
  • Unit Name (suite, apartment, flat, etc.).
• MPA may be an external building, suite, or unit with a separate entrance or internal to a building accessed via a shared entrance

Most significant countries for which we added MPAs are Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada.

The feature state is ALPHA.

Provide better address quality to your customers in South Africa

We enhanced South Africa Geocoding quality in a number of areas:

• Building names in address queries are now being recognized and matched. In South Africa, building names exist for Erf numbers and other property designations. In results, building names are included in the building address attribute. The Geocoder endpoint can recognize and match building names. Note that searching for building names is not supported by other endpoints, including Autocomplete, Autosuggest, and Discover Search.
• We improved naming of district municipalities in South Africa: In district municipalities of South Africa, the default county naming convention is enhanced. Now, the default county name includes the name of the local municipality. The name of the district municipality is coded as an alternative county and will only be displayed in the response if it matches the query.

HERE Routing

We are happy to provide some important improvements in EV and truck routing, you can see below. Of course more optimization on accuracy and route choice was done in the last months (and we are working on constant improvements).

Here's what's new:

1. EV routing - skipping of charging stations: As you might know, we are providing you with a charging strategy when calculating routes which go beyond your initial range. Now you are able to block specific charging stations from being added automatically and request a new route with new charging strategy without that stations to be used. Why would you need this? You might have bad experience with the charging station regarding reliability or simply dont like it. Other reasons might apply too.
2. EV Routing - performance optimization: Actually this is not a feature, but the impact is big and a lot of work went into this - EV routing is now powered by the latest routing algorithm. This leads to lower response times in conjunction with better quality routes. 
3. Truck routing - route choice improvement (avoiding small roads): What is a good route, what is a bad route? This categorization is not easily done and differs by use case and scenario, but we can report to get better constantly. This time we received data on bad routes, which made trucks leave bigger roads like highways too early, instead they wanted to stay on a longer route, but on the "safer" bigger road types. We managed to implement now 2 profiles for avoiding small roads, which cover the need from our big and small customers with different truck sizes. It was beta-tested in the market, which allowed us to iterate and improve - and the feedback is great, time to put it in the market and provide general access.
4. Truck routing - return railroad crossing: Who couldn't imagine, that railroad crossings are shaking your car when passing them. For trucks, this is even more severe. We are happy to now have warnings about railroad crossings in our routing response.

Refer to the documentation, which you can find on the HERE new documentation portal: https://www.here.com/docs

HERE Map Rendering - Raster Tile API 3.0.17

We are excited to announce the availability of our minor release 3.0.17 of the HERE Raster Tile API.

The HERE Raster Tile API provides server-side rasterised map tiles, including base, satellite, hybrid map views and premium content, and enables the development of business applications based on the latest HERE platform data.

Here's what's new:

1. Added a new map style called logistics.day. The special "Logistics" map style is designed to improve map visualization in logistics-related applications, such as fleet management and asset tracking applications. The style highlights important objects such as truck toll roads (dark-green colour), logistics facilities, industrial zones, state borders, motorway exit numbers and names, and transport-related POIs, while reducing the visibility of less important map elements. Service requests with logistics.day style are charged at the Advanced Raster Tile API pricing rate.

• HINT:You can combine this style with the vehicle_restrictions feature to display additional data that is related to specific legal, physical or hazardous regulations (purple colour) that apply to certain types of vehicles when traveling on roads or highways:

2. Added additional vehicle restrictions related to the number of axles: weight per axle group, weight per axle number.

3. Added lite.night and light.satellite.day styles. The new styles are a variants of explore style optimized for use as a background for overlays.

Deprecation of Verimi login for Developer.HERE.com

Effective December 1, 2023, HERE will no longer provide support for Verimi logins. As part of the migration of accounts from developer.here.com to platform.here.com, HERE will not renew Verimi certificates, and will stop supporting login via Verimi. This will impact a very limited number of users. For those users currently still using Verimi, we apologize for the inconvenience. Logins to your account may still be completed using your developer.here.com username and password.