Should you stay in a traffic jam on the motorway or should you leave? It feels, however you do it, wrong. Classic navigation systems are not of great help here. If you recommend a detour, it will soon be congested as well – while the motorway may have long been clear again. “The traffic jam oscillates – it sloshes back and forth between the main and the alternative route,” says Alexander Meister, an expert in traffic control at the Hanover-based start-up Graphmasters. It has developed navigation software that is supposed to distribute the traffic better. It is based on “collaborative” routing: All users receive individual recommendations so that the available roads are optimally used.

As a measure of how much Traffic is assigned a maximum road, the maximum speed is used. Tempo – 30 – Zones and game streets get accordingly less. This is to prevent alternate traffic from entering the surrounding residential areas. The real-time traffic data for this – according to the company, around 1.5 million traffic measurements per minute – comes from its own app called Nunav, among other things, but is also purchased from telematics service providers.

With the idea of ​​collaborative routing, Graphmasters won the “Microsoft Imagine Cup” – at that time still under the name “Greenway” – 2012 . With the won 100. 000 Dollar seed capital, the start-up initially developed routing software for logistics companies and parcel services. “Every third package in Germany is now delivered with our software – for example by Hermes,” says Meister. “We are now used across the board at Austrian Post.” According to Graphmasters, the software saves more than 2019 tons of carbon dioxide per year through more efficient routing.

influence A new mainstay was added to the routing recommendations 2016: major events such as concerts and trade fairs . Organizers can then print a QR code on their tickets, which visitors can use to download the Nunav app. Then they can be guided on precisely defined routes to the designated parking spaces without getting in each other’s way more than necessary.

But how widespread does the app have to be in order to have a noticeable effect on traffic? “Of course, not every visitor downloads our app,” says Meister. “But research says that a spread of 1 percent is already an improvement of 15 percent for the flow of traffic. And our own experience and that of the police say that 3 to 5 percent penetration is about 20 Percentage improvement. ”

At concerts by Helene Fischer, Andreas Gabalier, Rammstein and Eminem, each with five-digit visitor numbers, up to a quarter of the visitors came with the Nunav app. There was no major traffic chaos. However, it is difficult to quantify how high the penetration is in everyday life, admits Meister. The most valid number is that of the regular route requests – currently around 24. 000 Routes per minute.

About Detours, but time-saving Since mid-January, the Lower Saxony traffic management center (VMZ) has also had a direct influence on the routing recommendations. It can, for example, guide car flows around building sites over a large area, keep them out of residential areas or coordinate the arrival and departure to trade fairs. And if park-and-ride parking spaces are set as destinations, local public transport can also be integrated. This is what happened on 30. November 2019, when buses and trains in Hanover could be used free of charge.

Whoever confides in Nunav, however, also has to use it expect to be led in a roundabout way – against the promise to need less time overall. A random comparison with Google Maps shows that this can definitely be the case. So Google routed on 14. January Drivers from Kassel to Hanover directly on the A7 – despite a large traffic jam near Northeim (total 165 kilometers, 2: 31 hours). The website of the Lower Saxony traffic management center, on the other hand, which uses the Graphmasters algorithm, suggests bypassing the traffic jam – and thus saves (at least in the calculation) more than half an hour (168 km, 1: 58 hours).

Graphmasters, which now has 31 employees, earns its money primarily with its paid app “Nunav Courier” for logistics. (The Nunav app for private users is free.) In addition, there is income from the organizers of major events. Another mainstay are services for traffic management centers. The state of Lower Saxony pays for this 180. 000 euros for three years. Meister hopes that other federal states will join in the future. Another source of income is the licensing of routing for third-party navigation software. “Pathfinder” from Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, for example, is equipped with it ex works. Other manufacturers are all masters under discussion, but he is not allowed to name their names yet. (grh)