Microsoft launches Bing Maps Routing API

Often referred to as ‘the traveling salesman problem’, planning how to most efficiently travel to a number of stops is an age-old problem. It’s difficult enough to optimise the stops for a single driver or delivery person’s day, and the challenge compounds quickly when trying to optimise routes for a fleet of drivers, your mobile salesforce, or a large team of repair personnel in the field.

A powerful addition to the Bing Maps Routing API is now available. With waypoint optimisation you can pass in up to 25 waypoints (stops) and they will be re-ordered and optimised to minimise travel time or distance.

The route optimisation performed is based on actual road-distance, which will yield much more accurate results compared to algorithms that cut corners and use simple straight-line ‘crow flies’ distance between stops (for example, geographic constraints like rivers, lakes and divided highways can return erroneous results when using simple straight-line ‘crow flies’ calculations).

If you already know which stops a given driver in your fleet is going to make, this new optimisation capability can bring big cost and time savings to your organisation. But what if you have dozens of drivers needing to make 100 stops? Which stops should be assigned to which drivers to provide each driver with the most efficient itinerary?

The Bing Maps Distance Matrix API is ideal for solving this complex logistics problem. You can use it to compute optimal travel time and distances from all origins to destinations at scale, and then combing with optimisation algorithms find the best stops for each driver to make. You can then use the waypoint optimisation function to find the best driving directions with turn by turn instructions for each driver’s itinerary.

For more information, contact Grey Matter Ltd, the authorised Bing Maps distributor.
www.greymatter.com/bingmaps