When a job can’t be assigned during route optimization, understanding why can help fixing the problem. Until now, our API returned only the single most likely reason. Sometimes that was misleading since it did not show the full picture. Consider this scenario: You set up a sequence relation requiring job A to be delivered before […]

Suppose you have a fleet of 5 drivers and 50 delivery stops. You want each driver to have a fair share of work — not one driver working 10 hours while another finishes in 2. Until now, you could use min-max to minimize the longest route. But min-max only cares about the maximum — it […]

When optimizing delivery routes, not all time spent at a stop is the same. Over the years, we’ve added several timing parameters to model real-world scenarios more accurately. With our latest addition, setup_time, we now cover another common case: fixed overhead when arriving at a location. The Timeline at a Stop Let me walk through […]

For a decade, I’ve wanted to build a simple game that shows why the Traveling Salesman Problem is fun to work on. Something I could pull up at a party when someone asks “so what does your company actually do?” Something my kids could play and understand why dad stares at vehicle routing problems all […]

Suppose you have 50 deliveries and you hire four drivers to make those deliveries. Each driver is either paid for a certain number of hours or is paid for a certain number of jobs. In this case, you wouldn’t necessarily want one driver to get all 50 deliveries, even if this minimizes the total variable […]