Four new experimental features are now available.

See U-turn Avoidance, Objectives, Single Non-Blocking Optimizations and Load Costs.

You can access these features through our REST and gRPC endpoints. Client libraries are not yet available.

Mitigate an issue where routes occasionally suggest a different arrival and departure location for a visit, even when the user has specified only one location for the visit request. When this issue happens, if the distance between arrival and departure locations is large, it can result in a fragmented route.

This mitigation results in smoother routes and can be visible in the API as reduced gaps in ShipmentRoute and Transition route polylines at Visit locations.

Previously, route polylines could have large gaps at Visit locations even when the VisitRequest arrival and departure locations or waypoints were set to be equal. This would generally happen when the VisitRequest location had multiple nearby roads or entrances as sometimes different navigation points would be chosen for arrival to and departure from the same location. This would result in a gap between the endpoints of incoming and outgoing route polylines for the Visit.

Now, suitable navigation points are chosen for VisitRequest locations before generating route polylines so the endpoints of incoming and outgoing route polylines for Visits (with equal arrival and departure locations) are likely to be closer together.

You can now generate route tokens using the Route Optimization API. Pass a route token to the Navigation SDK to guide how it routes your vehicle. For details, see Transition Polylines and Route Tokens.

Fixed an issue where duplicate GcsDestination uris (which represent output files for the optimization responses) were accepted in BatchOptimizeToursRequest AsyncModelConfigs for the BatchOptimizeTours API. Now GcsDestination uris must be unique across all BatchOptimizeToursRequest AsyncModelConfigs in a single BatchOptimizeTours API call. This is desirable behavior to fail the BatchOptimizeTours call earlier as the call will not be able to complete successfully if enough output files are not provided.

Fixed

Fixed an issue where duplicate GcsSource uris (which represent input files for the optimization requests) were accepted in BatchOptimizeToursRequest AsyncModelConfigs for the BatchOptimizeTours API. Now GcsSource uris must be unique across all BatchOptimizeToursRequest AsyncModelConfigs in a single BatchOptimizeTours API call. This is desirable behavior to avoid processing the same request twice in case of accidental input duplication.

Route Optimization API

Announcing the General Availability (GA) release of the Route Optimization API.

The Route Optimization API assigns tasks and routes to a vehicle fleet, optimizing against the objectives and constraints that you supply for your transportation goals.

If you are a new user, see Set up your Google Cloud project to start the development process.