How to use HERE Maps to develop custom routing algorithms?

Question

I am trying to use HERE Maps to implement the eco-routing algorithm which we developed in our lab that requires real time traffic data as an input to the routing algorithm. So far, we were using INRIX dataset to verify our algorithms, but we decided to move to HERE Maps, and use the Traffic API to harness the power of real time traffic data.

Traffic API was very simple to use, and I managed to get the traffic data for a bounding box. It seems like that the traffic flow is passed for each TMC. My question is how to assign the traffic flow data to the links of the map using TMC. More specifically, I am wondering if there is a way to transform the TMC values to an adjacency matrix so that I can assign the traffics to each link and run my optimization algorithm over that graph? Also is it possible to overlay Open Street Maps (OSM) with the HERE Maps traffic data?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can associate the TMC data you get from the traffic data response to a particular link by using PDE layers LINK_TMC_FC1..5. You have look into our PDE documentation in developer site and tcs.ext.here.com/pde/maps?url_root=pde.api.here.com to see the list of layers provided. Below is a sample PDE request for the Link TMC. Replace app id and code placeholders with actuals:

https://pde.api.here.com/1/tile.json?&layer=LINK_TMC_FC1&level=9&tilex=496&tiley=358&region=WEU&release=18131&url_root=pde.api.here.com&app_id={YOUR-APP-ID}&app_code={YOUR-APP-CODE}

For all your other questions on creating a matrix and OSM overlay, you have to write your own algorithm. There is no straight forward function provided by Here.