When calculating a route with more than 2 waypoints, it often happens that logistic events occur at intermediate stops, which can modify some routing-relevant characteristics of the selected vehicle.
The most common use-case is obviously unloading or loading some goods at a stop, which implies a change of the weight of the vehicle. The nature of the transported goods can also be important, for instance when it relates to hazardous materials : some roads should then be either preferred or avoided. Last but not least, adding or removing a trailer will definitely modify the dimensions of the vehicle itself.
Such vehicle adaptions can sometimes have a sensitive impact on the path of the optimal route, or even on toll costs. And more commonly, they also directly affect the quantity of emitted pollutants and the energy consumption for a given route.
While it is of course possible to split a route request in several requests with different input vehicle configurations, it is much more performant and user-friendly to be able to consider these changes in a single request.
This is why the version V1.14.0 of the PTV Developer Routing API now offers you to (re-)define some of the vehicle parameters directly in your on-road or off-road waypoints, with the POST method : calculateRoutePost.
Our new code sample provides you a fast-and-easy way to evaluate the influence of the change of load weight at waypoints. As shown on the screenshot below, it is preconfigured to test a route where unloading the goods at the second waypoint influences the course of the route.
Please have a look on our technical concept to get more information about waypoints handling.
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