Optimize Multiple Itineraries is done?

Question

Hi everyone! Just to make sure, was Optimize Multiple Itineraries, which was pumped up in Bing Maps, just killed? Apparently, I misread the documentation. I was sure Optimize Multiple Itineraries would move to Azhur Maps along with all the available functionality and similar pricing. But in fact, they just killed this service and offered to build a whole Azhur+NVidia infrastructure in exchange for doing routing calculations. Now, did I understand everything correctly? Who also figured this out? Please confirm.

Are there any good alternatives? I need the service to optimize the route for several points (for example, 11 points except for the start and finish), take into account the working hours of the intermediate points (for example, you can only arrive at location 4 before 11:00, and at location 7 only after 5 p.m.), as well as the dependencies between them (you can only go to location 3 after 6, to 4 after 10 and 2, and 7 only after 5). Google Maps can't do this out of the box.

Answer 1

I recall this service retirement being announced a while back and it being made clear it wasn't moving to Azure Maps. The Azure Maps team put together documentation on how to create a similar solution here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-maps/itinerary-optimization-service

They have a live code sample here: https://samples.azuremaps.com/rest-services/mio with source code here:

• https://github.com/Azure-Samples/AzureMapsCodeSamples/tree/main/Samples/REST%20Services/MIO
• https://github.com/Azure-Samples/AzureMapsCodeSamples/tree/main/Services/SampleFunctions

Aside from that there are a lot of ways to do this in Azure already. Typically, these types of calculations are very heavy and it's best to do it as close to the data as possible (e.g. in the database). Azure Postgres has extensions such as pgRouting and PostGIS, which provide solutions for this. There are also a ton of open-source solutions for different edge case scenarios. There are also third part solutions that are cheaper:

• https://www.routesavvy.com/bing-maps-mio-to-routesavvy-api/
• https://nextbillion.ai/

I'm not on the maps team so can only speculate as to why this service is being retired. Nearly every customer I worked with around logistics optimizations had unique constraints/requirements that few others would be interested in. In many cases this Bing service wasn't a good fit for a solution with these unique requirements and it was better (cheaper/faster) to simply generate a network graph using a distance/route matrix API and feed that into a custom solution.

Answer 2

Hello!

We do not offer Multiple Itinerary Optimization for Azure Maps, however as you pointed out you could either use Azure Maps + Nvidia CuOpt solution which offers high performance and accuracy, or you can build your own service using Azure Maps and an open-source optimization engine based on your optimization needs.

Both options require calling the Route Matrix to get the travel cost matrix, which is then sent to an optimization engine to generate the route. We have increased the support for the number of cells to 50K in Route Matrix, allowing you to pass a greater number of itinerary items in the same request now.