mapping Archives

Advance Calculation of New Toll Prices

Posted on 30 November, 20237 August, 2025 by David Priestman

PTV Logistics today announced the availability of a new toll calculation in PTV Map&Guide and PTV Developer products for Germany and Austria. This enhanced functionality is based on the official announcements of toll rates from Germany and Austria. The update allows customers to calculate their costs based on the new toll fees and reliably estimate the resulting costs in advance.

The new toll calculation enhancement offers companies a practical solution to respond to the legal requirements in Germany and Austria in a timely manner. In Germany, the introduction of CO2 emission classes for truck tolls will come into effect on December 1, 2023. The new toll tariff regulation in Austria, which also involves the introduction of a tariff for traffic-related CO2 emissions, will take effect in 2024.

Customers that use PTV Map&Guide, or PTV Developer, receive updated toll predictions and accurate toll prices at any time. Multiple factors such as vehicle type, distance travelled and time of day are all factored into the toll calculation for customers. Accurate toll prices are a critical factor in professional route planning. Toll costs can represent a significant portion of total transportation costs and therefore have a significant impact on the financial decisions of companies.

“With the developer components from PTV Logistics, we have been able to reliably calculate toll costs for years,” says Thomas Pentza, IT-Leiter of Geis-Gruppe Deutschland. “We always have the current tariffs, sometimes even before they come into effect so that we can calculate our offers precisely in advance.”

“We believe that the new toll calculation enhancements in PTV Map&Guide and PTV Developer will help our customers save money and time to ultimately have a positive impact on their business profitability and sustainability goals,” says Knuth Sexauer, Chief Commercial Officer, PTV Logistics. The new toll calculator enhancement in PTV Map&Guide and PTV Developer is now available to customers.

Mapping Here and Everywhere

Posted on 25 November, 20227 August, 2025 by David Priestman

David Priestman met with HERE Technologies at the Gartner Supply Chain Xpo in London to see how a sleeping giant in mapping and location technology has set eyes on becoming ‘the number 1 in location’.

Seldom have we seen a supply chain crisis like the one faced today, involving all aspects of global trade and exacerbated by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Companies need to take the time to build more resilient operations to withstand future shocks. Fleet managers face a lot of pressure, whether it’s knowing the toll roads to avoid or getting things delivered on time. Location data is making this more seamless with the precise location, ETA and tracking of vehicles much improved. Technology such as 5G will only strengthen this further.

HERE Technologies is a name you may not know of, yet you quite possibly have used the company’s mapping technology while driving. 35 years young, with 6400 employees in 52 countries HERE wish mapping to be seen as an end in itself, with users paying for precise location. The company created the first digital map more than 35 years ago and has been in the SatNav market since 1994. It was part of Nokia for a while. Now it is owned by strategic investors including Audi, BMW and Daimler.

Christoph Herzig, pictured, is Head of Product Management, Supply Chain Solutions at HERE. He told me that the company has been offering mapping and positioning services and Application Programming Interface (APIs) to logistics companies for 10 years. The technology is integrated into SAP and Oracle’s TMS as well.

“We have our own platform with several hundred thousand users and want to become the number 1 in location,” Herzig said. HERE’s mapping features HD and 3D images, uses 900 data attributes and is approved as an AWS supply chain partner. “This means it is good for autonomous vehicles,” Herzig stated, “the HERE HD Live Map is centimetres accurate.”

TMS Partners

Current partners/customers include TMS suppliers and fleet managers. “They use our routing, geo-coding and vehicle problem solver options,” Herzig added. One customer is Active Logistics, a German TMS supplier. By using HERE, Active can enable multi-stop planning for couriers like UPS and auto-planning of routes.

“We want to sell directly now, to 3PLs/LSPs too,” Herzig continued. “Our target buyers are C.O.O.s and C.I.O.s.” HERE offers IoT tracking capacity for assets and parts. “You can navigate to the final metre and we’re offering more shipment visibility, adding air and marine schedules too,” he claimed. Data security and anonymisation for GDPR is also promised.

Data is key

The transport and logistics industry is increasingly reliant on location data and needs end-to-end visibility. Company assets can be viewed in a detailed, comprehensive, and accurate manner, and as the technology runs in real-time this gives businesses the visibility they need to manage their connections.

“Fleet managers still have a lot of concerns about the disadvantages of electric vehicles,” Herzig asserts. ”Location technology can take that burden away and make it easy to move to electric vehicles. Electrifying the last mile would have a profound impact on the CO2 emissions in many cities. With HERE’s Routing API, for example, you can input the consumption model, which depends on the ascent, descent, acceleration and deceleration along the route in addition to auxiliary power usage like air conditioning to calculate an EV-optimized route. This can extend the range of the vehicle. This works well because our map data contains all necessary information about slope, curve angle, and speed limits of each road in your city, correlated with historic traffic flow. We want to be like Intel. The advertising motto should be ‘it’s HERE inside’!”

3D City Models for Geospatial Transportation Data

Posted on 13 January, 20217 August, 2025 by David Priestman

HERE Technologies, a leading location data and technology platform, has unveiled high-fidelity, 3D models of 75 city centers around the world to give software developers the geospatial data needed to build real-world visualizations of cities. With HERE Premier 3D Cities, last-mile delivery drivers can navigate dense cities with maps that highlight precise building dimensions and entry points along their delivery routes. Telecommunications companies can optimize their buildouts of 5G networks in 3D and urban planners and emergency responders can build digital twins for better land use analysis and disaster readiness simulations.

HERE Premier 3D Cities contain rich data layers and attributes that are aligned to physical geometry and terrain. Each structure is indexed, addressable, and accurate in terms of physical location, volume size, elevation and façade color. Currently, the Audi A8 luxury sedan’s modular infotainment platform (MIB2+) integrates HERE 3D city models, providing drivers with the latest navigation user interface and lane-level guidance experiences.

“With the enterprise developer in mind, HERE has captured, indexed and mapped the world’s major road networks and urban centers in 3D,” said Jørgen Behrens, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at HERE Technologies. “We’re excited to see how these unique 3D city models open up a world of possibilities and value for businesses. They are the building blocks to create accurate, sub-meter augmented reality applications that are transforming supply chains, transportation and mobility networks, and overall consumer experiences.”

The indexed and addressable structures within HERE Premier 3D Cities allow developers to search and highlight individual buildings, attach additional metadata to the structures, and apply advanced rendering techniques including CGI applications. HERE Premier 3D Cities are available in Cesium/OGC 3D Tiles to support seamless integration. Each kilometer of data is stored in small-sized tiles for efficient streaming and rendering. Sample datasets of London, Berlin and Munich are currently available on AWS Data Exchange.

HERE has mapped 196 countries and collects more than 28 terabytes of terrestrial LiDAR data every day. HERE Premier 3D Cities are created with multiple sources – including LiDAR, optical and satellite imagery – and decades of cartographic expertise and AI/Machine Learning applications the company has developed to deliver industry leading location-based services to enterprises globally.

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