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PTV NaviGuide - Innovative Online Navigation Concepts

PTV NaviGuide is an online navigation solution which allows automobile manufacturers, wireless carriers and providers of telematic services to offer their customers a new form of dynamic navigation. The system gives car drivers the opportunity to be guided through traffic by requesting optimal routes from a service centre using mobile end devices such as PDA, smartphones or Java-based mobile phones. Fixed navigation systems are no longer required.

Advantages for the car and motorbike driver

Telecommunication and navigation are growing together: The driver uses his every-day PDA for navigation and profits from high quality route calculations with dynamic traffic data and up-to-date maps provided by the service centre. By clicking the organiser's touchpad, additional on-line services from the provider are also available, such as a hotel guide or an address book.

Low-cost navigation solution
Mobile devices, such as mobile phones or smartphones with GPS modules, can be used as a navigation system.
Dynamic routing
While calculating the optimal route, the system takes current traffic information as well as traffic hotspots into account. As a result, the driver avoids congested road sections and receives a highly exact travel time forecast. To ensure that the driver has up-to-date traffic information for the route calculation, he or she can request regular updates during the trip.
PTV RealTimes calculates realistic journey times and arrival times by taking the current traffic conditions into account.
Up-to-date map material
With PTV NaviGuide the service centre provides up-to-date road maps of different countries. Expensive map updates are therefore a thing of the past.
PTV TiledMap, the map format of the future. It divides the world into tiles and allows map sections to be selectively up-dated and extended.
Access to online services
The provider's online services, such as hotel guides, portal or location-related information and points of interests, can be accessed via the mobile device and included in the routing. Your mobile workforce simply uses the customer database of the CRM system as destination memory.

Advantages for service providers

Improving customer relationship management
The new online navigation solution enables you to provide new innovative in-car services in order to increase both customer loyalty and revenues.
Improved market positioning
Offering online navigation services puts you ahead of the competition and demonstrates your power of innovation.
Profitable revenue growth through cross and up selling
More and more service providers bundle their range of products to foster up cross-selling opportunities. PTV NaviGuide provides an excellent cross-selling basis for value-added services. A web-enabled online navigation system opens the door for a comprehensive range of services, including hotel guides, parking guides or traffic information services.
Profitable partnerships
Online navigation paves the way for profitable alliances and revenue sharing models with third-party content providers.

System description

The complete PTV NaviGuide system consists of the server software that is operated by a hosting centre and the client software that runs on PDAs, smartphones or onboard mobile devices. The client software is responsible for the route request and the actual route navigation by voice output and icon display. The server software calculates the route based on up-to-date map material, current traffic information and historical traffic hotspot information. The server software is based on PTV's eServer technology which has proven its efficiency as central technology platform in numerous telematics projects.

The most important features are:

Turn-by-turn navigation using icons and voice instructions
The navigation system combines icons and voice instructions provide clear and simple routing.
Clearly structured map display
In addition to the icons and voice instructions, the route is displayed on different maps. The user can choose between an overview map or detailed maps for routing.
Dynamic navigation
PTV NaviGuide is based on a specific dynamic routing approach taking the current traffic situation as well as road speed profiles relating to the time of day into account. The system smoothly guides the driver through dense traffic and supplies highly-exact travel time forecasts.
Automatic route up-dates
In order to provide up-to-date information on the changing traffic situation, PTV NaviGuide uses a specific data up-date approach by regularly retrieving the latest traffic news at the service centre. In this way the navigation includes up-to-the-minute traffic information for the entire route.
Route corridor
PTV NaviGuide provides a specific, corridor-based routing approach. The route data transferred from the server to the client allows the user to flexibly drive within the transferred route corridor without having to send a new request. This feature provides the driver with maximum flexibility and quickly reroutes, if, for example, the driver takes a wrong turn or wants to take an alternative route.
Adjustable routing options
The user can set to what extent route data has to be transferred. The driver is able to minimise communication costs, for example for trips abroad with high roaming fees, by reducing update cycles or corridor width. Moreover, he can indicate whether the route calculation is to be optimised relating to time or distance, whether toll routes should be avoided or ferry connection have to be taken into account.
High-quality map material
PTV NaviGuide uses map data provided by NAVTEQ, a world leader in premium-quality digital map data. The data are continuously enhanced by combining them with PTV map data or other local data sources.
Multiple network support
The communication during the route requests and data transfers are performed by using either GSM, GPRS, UTMS, HSDPA or similar connections.
Reduced data rates
All route calculations are performed on the server side. This means that the route data volume which has to be transferred is considerably reduced and communication costs are minimised. Moreover, the client only requires little processing power and memory space so that the system can be easily linked to different mobile devices with limited memory capacity.
Connection with other online services
PTV NaviGuide can be easily linked to hotel guides, traffic information services and other online services, which means that it provides customized service offerings that can be easily adapted to the customer's needs.
Easy integration into existing system environments
PTV NaviGuide enables easy integration into existing billing and CRM systems. It is also possible to ask a call agent to enter your destination address.

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