TomTom (TOM2) today announced that, in a single month, it has made 1.5 billion changes to its digital maps which are delivered to TomTom customers on a weekly basis. The milestone is key to the company’s mission to shape the future of mobility in a world that increasingly relies on digital maps as an accurate representation of reality.
On average, TomTom’s map is updated more than 570 times a second. The changes are a mixture of geometry and road features and may include new POIs, altered road junctions or new addresses.
Alain De Taeye, Member of TomTom’s Management Board, comments: “The time between a change happening in the real world and this change being reflected in our map is now much shorter than ever before. Every change that happens in our map is quality guaranteed – so not only can we scale beyond other mapmakers, it also comes with the right level of quality for even the most demanding applications.”
Over the past years, TomTom has optimized professional mapmaking techniques with the use of community input from hundreds of millions of map users worldwide, GPS probe data from 550 million connected devices, local map technicians and mobile mapping vehicles. TomTom’s transactional map production platform, with continuous integration, uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to ensure short cycle times between detecting changes in the real world and updating the map – with guaranteed quality levels. This level of scalability allows TomTom to deal with any level of detail in both its navigation map and high definition (HD) map for autonomous vehicles.
De Taeye continues: “To shape the future of mobility, 1.5 billion changes to our maps in a single month proves the scalability of our unique production platform, and brings us a step closer to real-time maps. We’re excited to be driving this future.”
