MapAnything API maps any (complex destination) thing
Like a London bus, you wait forever for a geolocation related developer tool and then two come along at once.
Last week we noted Here technologies and its geocoding capabilities.
This week it’s the turn of MapAnything, a company known for its location-aware API services.
August sees the firm come forward with a selection of new (mostly REST) API services.
As many readers will know, REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style for developing web services that is popular due to its simplicity and the fact that it builds upon existing systems and features of the Internet’s HTTP.
MapAnything’s Distance Matrix that calculates optimal shortest path and true travel time for a combination of locations and destinations — this service is designed to enhance an enterprise application that requires complex TSP (Traveling Salesman Problems) or VRP (Vehicle Routing Problem) calculations.
“When you look at the market for location and routing services, most of the innovation is going into autonomous vehicles and consumer apps, but we believe innovation is desperately needed in the B2B sector as well,” said John Stewart, CEO and co-founder of MapAnything.
Stewart contends that legacy technology and API services used by transportation, logistics and field service applications was designed for on-premise hardware before the age of cloud computing.
Traffic windows
The company claims to have produced the first commercially available distance matrix that offers up to nine distinct ‘traffic windows’.
“The MapAnything Distance Matrix offers the capability to solve up to 7,500 x 7,500 or 56,250,000 shortest path calculations in a single API request, problems that are an order of magnitude larger than any other commercially available solution,” said Stewart.
The Distance Matrix API is available with additional services including a routing and scheduling API capable of handling complex attributes such as customer-to-vehicle/technician affinity, time windows, multi-capacity based routing, and multi-day, multi-vehicle routing.
There is also a Live GPS Position API for developers wanting to track vehicle, asset and smartphone device locations and incorporate the live data into business workflow apps.