October News from GraphHopper

It is and was a special year, and we almost forgot to send out a newsletter, even though we developed many new features. You can subscribe to the low frequent newsletter when you register here.

The biggest change is that all our routing-related APIs like the Matrix API, Isochrone API, Routing API and Route Optimization API now support turn restrictions. Read our blog post about it where you can understand why we were able to live without it for so many years.

Directly related is a cool new feature that we call ‘curbside’ support and it allows you to specify on which side of the road your vehicle should do the pick up or delivery because you want to avoid e.g. crossing the road or U-turns.

There are a number of new feature specifically created for the Route Optimization API. You can now schedule activities and jobs without a fixed pre-assigned location. Another feature allows you to specify driver shifts to better support the modeling of different operating days for vehicles. Furthermore, you can now specify a minimum number of jobs for each driver to better distribute work over your drivers. And finally, you can solve vehicle routing problems without knowing the actual starting position of your drivers, i.e. drivers no longer necessarily need a starting coordinate.

The year 2020 was also the year where we released version 1.0 of the open source GraphHopper routing engine. This new version brought many new features such as fast alternative routing and customizable routing. The customizable routing is still an alpha feature and not yet available in the GraphHopper Directions API, but we want your feedback now! And in the meantime we already released version 2.0. Try it out now and give us a star at GitHub!

Happy Routing!