How HERE boosts AI route optimization with a reasoning layer

In dispatching, there’s a cruel joke when planning assets. It goes like this: the perfect route plan built at 6 a. m. rarely survives contact with 9 a. m. traffic, a sick driver, or a carrier that goes dark. HERE Technologies is betting the fix isn’t a better plan.

Instead, it built a system that keeps learning from what actually happens after the plan leaves the office. Bart Coppelmans of HERE Technologies walked FreightWaves through the company’s roadmap in an interview at Home Delivery World.

In it, he covers upgrades to HERE’s tour planning engine, a newly launched driver feedback tool called Last Meter Guidance, and a prototype AI route optimization reasoning layer built to explain its decisions instead of just handing them down. The Planning-Execution Gap Tour planning is one of HERE’s oldest services, in development for a decade.

New features are pushing adoption higher, Coppelmans said. “We started developing this ten years ago, but it’s really picking up in the market now as one of the best performing solvers, especially because of what we added last year,” Coppelmans said. window. googletag = window. googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag. cmd. push(function() {googletag.

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push(function() {googletag. display('div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0'); }); Chief among those additions is time-dependent optimization that accounts for how traffic changes delivery capacity throughout the day. “At nine o’clock in the morning you can deliver fewer orders than at one o’clock in the afternoon because of traffic jams,” Coppelmans said.

HERE also added driver-friendly overlapping tours, which cut down on the territory conflicts drivers hate seeing on their routes, along with walk clustering, a feature that identifies when a driver should park once and deliver several stops on foot rather than repeatedly pulling in and out of a vehicle.

“From one parking spot you can then deliver by walking to multiple different deliveries in a certain area, which might be more efficient than driving in and out of your vehicle,” Coppelmans said.

Last Meter Guidance Closes the Loop None of that solves the deeper problem Coppelmans wanted to discuss: the gap between what dispatch plans in the morning and what a driver actually encounters in the field.

“If you have a perfect plan by six in the morning, by nine it can already be different because of unexpected events — a driver getting sick, a carrier going dark or last-minute order changes,” Coppelmans said. “You need to be really dynamic and flexible, taking that into account.”

HERE’s answer is Last Meter Guidance, a client-side service that runs on a handheld device or driver app and collects sensor and positioning data from the field. window. googletag = window. googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag. cmd. push(function() {googletag.

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push(function() {googletag. display('div-gpt-ad-1665767553440-0'); }); “We’re automatically collecting sensor and probe positioning points, we have our own positioning stack,” Coppelmans said. “This service builds on top of that, really making sure we’re learning from the field.

We’re collecting traces data from where the vehicle is parking, the walk path toward the building, flagging the building entrance and the final delivery end-point location.” That data flows in both directions.

Dispatchers get more accurate delivery windows, and drivers get parking and entrance guidance built on where previous drivers actually succeeded, not just where a map thinks a building’s front door is. “There’s no disconnect anymore,” Coppelmans said. “Drivers are more comfortable trusting what is being planned and can say, ‘Okay, this makes sense.’”

AI Route Optimization Learns to Explain Itself Sitting on top of both services is what HERE refers to as a route optimization cognitive layer, a prototype agentic capability the company expects to move into closed beta later this year. Where the underlying tour planning API tells a dispatcher what to do, the reasoning layer is meant to tell them why.

“Why are these orders unassigned? Why are these two trucks going down the same street on the same day?” Coppelmans said. “It might be because of actual constraints, driving skills, or certain priorities.” window. googletag = window. googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag. cmd. push(function() {googletag. defineSlot('/21776187881/fw-responsive-main_content-s