Making Maps the TomTom Way

A Layered Approach

Mention TomTom and you’re likely to conjure up images of small rectangular black boxes sitting on your windscreen or dashboard, giving you directions to your destination. While that is not entirely incorrect, TomTom is more than just personal navigation devices.

To learn more about TomTom, we visited the company’s headquarters in Amsterdam, just off the city’s waterfront, to meet their co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Peter-Frans Pauwels, and also other top executives and mapping experts.

And one of the key messages that Peter-Frans Pauwels was keen to impress upon us from the get-go was that the crown jewel of TomTom is its maps, not its devices. "It's about what we put into our devices that matters", Pauwels said. And not all maps, he stressed, are equal. "There is a lot that goes into TomTom’s maps to make it so unique."

TomTom, as he outlined, is all about getting its customers from A to B in cars. And to do that properly and in the most efficient way, accurate maps are but just the building blocks and more needs to be done. And this is where TomTom distinguishes itself from the competition. Hence, TomTom adopts what they called a “layered approach” to making maps, where on top of the latest and most up-to-date maps, TomTom adds its own innovations such as MapShare, IQ Routes and HD Traffic. These technologies are crucial, because they help highlight changes in maps and also find not just routes for the users, but the quickest possible routes. We’ll elaborate on these two technologies later, but first, it’s necessary to talk about the raw maps since they really are the foundation to any good navigation software.

Prior to TomTom’s acquisition of digital map maker Tele Atlas in 2008, the company had to purchase base maps from other makers. However, the acquisition of Tele Atlas has given TomTom what Pauwels fondly called the “mother database”. With the rich selection of base maps from Tele Atlas, TomTom now has the necessary foundation from which to build upon.

A map by itself is not navigable. It needs additional information such as street names, street directions, traffic rules, speed limits, addresses and landmarks for it to work. These are the details TomTom needs to add on to the base maps. And while you might think of it as nothing, TomTom assured us that it is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. Apart from using local authoritative sources to verify the map, sometimes, TomTom requires to send its mapping experts into the field to check and verify the base map as well as add more details.

These mapping experts survey the area and makes sure that the base maps are accurate (eg. roads are where they are supposed to be) and vital information like street names and speed limits are correct. To have a better understanding of what it is they do, we spent an afternoon with the mapping experts as they surveyed a new suburban town to make updates to the existing base map.

Out in the Field

Depending on the area that needs to be checked and verified, TomTom can opt to either send out just its field staff or deploy its mobile mapping vehicle if its an expansive area that needs to be covered. Field staff are typically armed with either a tablet PC and an iPhone. Using the tablet PC, they can make changes to the existing base maps and these changes can later be uploaded to their mapping department. The iPhone is loaded with a TomTom-developed app called Field Editor, which field staff can use to take photos of anything that is deemed important to note, such as speed limits, road signs, junctions and landmarks.

If the area is expansive enough, TomTom can choose to deploy one of its 22 mobile mapping vans worldwide. The vans are armed with an arsenal of equipment such as a Lady 360º camera that is programmed to take photos of the road and its surrounding environment at fixed distance intervals,and lasers that can measure road dimensions and determine road conditions and even road signs. The vehicle also has a gyroscope that measures the gradient and also the curvature of roads.

Post Processing

The area we worked on was a new suburban neighborhood about 20 minutes away from the city center. Satellite imaging showed us that pretty extensive changes have been made when contrasted against an existing map in their database. However, once we were at the actual site, we noticed that there were further changes that were not reflected in the latest satellite imagery. This is why it is so important and also so labor-intensive for TomTom to verify and make sure their maps are up to date.

After our updates have been recorded by TomTom’s mapping centre, changes can now be made to the map itself. This is done using TomTom’s very own in-house developed software called “Cartopia”, which is short for “Cartographer’s Utopia”.

Cartopia is a browser-based mapping tool and it is a powerful one, allowing map editors to see a wide range of information with regards to the road. As for the field work we’ve done, the updates we’ve made on site are now readily available for viewing in the software as notes that are overlaid on the map itself. With the notes, the cartographer can then verify whether changes need to be made to the map.

Apart from changes made by TomTom’s own staff, TomTom also has a unique technology called Map Share. Map Share is a community technology where users can make corrections on their own devices, and then after, send these corrections to TomTom at a later time when their devices are connected to their computer. On the other hand, users can also receive these Map Share corrections from other users as well, keeping their maps as up-to-date as possible. Further to that, TomTom will also review these updates from users and if it verifies them to be correct, TomTom will then revise its maps and offer them as official updates.

All this is just to ensure the maps are as up-to-date as it is physically and technically possible. And although an accurate and up-to-date map is crucial, this is but the first layer of TomTom’s layered approach to mapmaking. On top of this base layer of up-to-date maps, TomTom adds its IQ Routes and HD Traffic technologies to distinguish themselves from the competition and make them even more beneficial for users. In the following pages, we will take a closer look at TomTom's IQ Routes and HD Traffic technologies.

IQ Routes - Using Historic Travel Data for More Efficient Routing

All modern navigation engines use a derivative of the Dijkstra’s Algorithm, a search algorithm developed by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra that finds the shortest path tree in any graph tree. To illustrate, you have to think of the road network where every junction is a node. Whenever you ask your personal navigation device for a route, it begins to look outwards from your current location until it comes to a junction, whereby it that ventures out into all the possible routes and continues looking. With this, the navigation engine has to explore up to a million nodes for a typical 100km route.

However, the shortest route from Point A to be Point B may not necessarily be the fastest, that’s because actual travel speed greatly affects the time taken. For that, TomTom introduced IQ Routes, which uses real measured speed data collected anonymously over the past six years from its 70 million users to calculate not just the shortest route, but also the fastest.

First, you might be wondering, how did TomTom obtain this all data? From users of it personal navigation devices of course. These travel data is logged onto the TomTom device and then uploaded to TomTom whenever the user connects the device to his PC to update it.

For years, TomTom has been asking users of its personal navigation devices if they would be willing to share travel data to help make a better product. Admittedly, even TomTom themselves were skeptical at first that users would be willing to share data, but according to them, well over 90% of their users were willing to do so if it would help make a better product.

And as TomTom stressed to us time and time again, the data collected is entirely anonymous. As co-founder Peter-Frans Pauwel said, there’s no point in keeping track of who is going where - what they want is the raw travel data. The data collected is even truncated at both ends, so for every trip made, there’s no knowing where the exact start and end points are.

The result of all those years of data collected, is IQ Routes, which uses real measured speed of roads to determine which is the best route to take. In addition, IQ Routes also takes time into account. For instance, if you request a route during morning peak hours, the device might advise you to stay off the highway because it gets heavily jammed. However, select the same destination in the afternoon and it might tell you to use the highway instead because based on historic speed profiles, the highway is less congested in the afternoon.

What this really means for TomTom is that their maps are not just a regular network of roads, but it is in fact a time-expanded network of roads.

Of course, this all adds complexity to the routing algorithm. In fact, in Europe where there’s 50 million crossings and 120 million roads, a time-expanded network would mean 800 sextillion (8 followed by 23 zeroes) possible routes. Even with modern technology, TomTom says it will take 25 trillion years to process. However, that’s with traditional routing algorithms. To be able to search through TomTom’s time-expanded network of possible routes, TomTom has further refined their search algorithm such that it is much, much more efficient.

Apart from the historical speed and travel data, another benefit from all the data that is logged (which are known internally as "probes"), is that it can also be used to identify where changes in the roads are. As we've seen earlier in Cartopia, probe markings where are there no roads could indicate that there's a new road in the area.

That said, the limitation of IQ Routes is that it is after all based on historic travel data and doesn’t accurately depict present traffic conditions. For example, unforeseen circumstances such as an accident, fallen tree or unexpected road works could cause delays that IQ Routes would never have picked up. And this leads us nicely to TomTom’s latest innovation, HD Traffic.

HD Traffic

Traditionally, traffic is monitored in one or more of the following ways:

• Induction loops in the road
• Strategically mounted cameras
• Traffic authorities in the field
• Other collaborative sources (in the case of Singapore, using taxi drivers to provide updates on traffic conditions)

The problem with these methods is that they are costly, labor-intensive and not scalable. TomTom recognized that to monitor traffic required them to think out of the box and in doing so, they discovered a much more cost effective way.

One of the most pervasive devices in our lives today is the mobile phone. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that nearly everyone has one. And this was exactly what TomTom did.

As you travel, your mobile phone signal is passed on from one base station to another. Using algorithms, TomTom can then determine what speed you are traveling at. In collaboration with telecommunication companies such as Vodafone, what TomTom has now millions of users with which they can monitor to get an idea of what the traffic situation in any given place (so long as there are mobile phone users of that particular telco) is like.

However, this technology has its limitations, because it is difficult to differentiate between signals. For instance, how do you tell if a particular signal is coming from someone who is walking by the side of the street as opposed to being in a car and stuck in slow traffic? How do you differentiate signals from a car or bus?

For this reason, TomTom introduced its Live Services. With Live services, users pay a subscription and have a data-enabled personal navigation device which can receive traffic updates as part of the HD Traffic service. At the same time, TomTom is also tracing them and keeping tabs on these subscribers and their travel speed. So for instance, when a particular subscriber is traveling much slower than what would be expected, TomTom can alert other users there’s a slowdown on the road this subscriber is traveling at and offer an alternative route. Once it gets more information about the slowdown, via traditional sources or otherwise, it can update its HD Traffic database with more information such as an accident or roadworks to let other TomTom Live subscribers know.

Live Services is therefore really a win-win situation. For subscribers, not only are they getting the latest updates, they are also contributing back to the community with their travel data. Furthermore, it’s a completely elegant solution that requires no input from users. For TomTom, what this means is that they can place more emphasis to data coming from their Live Services subscribers as opposed to the millions of unmarked signals coming from mobile phone users.

To get a firsthand feel of how HD Traffic works, the service is also available for free on their website.

TomTom's Traffic Manifesto

Today, the personal navigation space is becoming increasingly crowded and this is reflected in sales of TomTom’s personal navigation devices, which have somewhat stagnated over the past few years. Much of this has to do with competition from the mobile space, in the form of Google’s and Microsoft’s mapping services.

Despite this, TomTom’s co-founder Peter-Frans Pauwels remains optimistic for the future and stated that while it is true that anyone who has access to maps can make a turn-by-turn navigation software, not everyone can do it on the same level that TomTom does simply because they don’t have the data.

For TomTom, selling personal navigation devices is all well and good, but they believe the way forward now is to look beyond the little black rectangular device that is sitting on the windscreen. This has led to creation of TomTom’s Traffic Manifesto, which simply goes - We are on a mission to reduce traffic congestion for all. According to TomTom, studies have shown that if as little as 10% of drivers use TomTom’s HD Traffic, there will be a "collective effect" where traffic times will be reduced by everyone by up to 5%. If you think about it, if drivers avoid roads that are already congested, it will at least help alleviate the condition by making the congestion less severe.

To achieve that, selling as many personal navigation devices alone is not going to work. TomTom is gradually but surely repositioning themselves as a content company. Already, they are providing their software, services and knowledge to car manufacturers who want to incorporate TomTom’s navigation software and maps into their car’s systems. And more recently, Apple announced that TomTom will be the primary map provider for their upcoming iOS 6.

For the foreseeable future, TomTom also has plans to introduced further elements to refine and improve its existing navigation software and maps, and also to increase the coverage of their services. Presently, TomTom’s HD Traffic service is available in 23 countries, mostly in Europe and in the United States, Canada and South Africa too. They hope to include some Asian countries to the mix soon, with Singapore being amongst one of the top countries on their list. As part of their manifesto, TomTom is also looking into collaborating with government traffic agencies around the world to help solve their congestion woes.

That said, TomTom’s Traffic Manifesto is truly a grand undertaking and one that will surely be welcomed by drivers around the world. And judging from what we’ve seen so far with respect to TomTom’s existing technologies such as Map Share, IQ Routes and HD Traffic, it seems that TomTom is well placed to achieve their goals. With that, we have to concur with TomTom’s co-founder Peter-Frans Pauwels. Truly, not all maps are equal.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.