Routing

Let the app decide which vehicle serves which visit, and in what order.

Routing plans the most efficient routes for your field users. You give it the visits and your vehicles; it returns, for each vehicle, the visits in the best order, taking into account opening hours, working hours, vehicle capacity and travel time. Fewer wasted trips, lower costs and more predictable days.

The optimization is based on the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP): it runs many iterations to find the shortest distance with the fewest vehicles, within the parameters you set.

Open Planning › Routing. It has three tabs, in the order you use them:

Tab	What you do there
Visit	Check the visits to plan and start the optimization.
Configuration	Set up your vehicles and the rules the optimization follows.
Result	Review the planned routes, adjust them and dispatch them as tasks.

Required permission:

• View vehicle, View configuration (Configuration)
• Route optimization (Optimize)
• View result, Edit result, Dispatch result (Result)

How it works

1. Prepare the visits

   Create tasks of a task type whose route configuration is set. Each Unassigned or Ongoing task becomes a visit. See How to Use.

2. Set up the vehicles

   In Configuration, add your vehicles with their working hours, speed, cost and capacity, and choose which ones to use.

3. Optimize

   In Visit, check the visits and click Optimize. The optimization runs in the background.

4. Review and dispatch

   In Result, look at the routes, move visits between vehicles if you need to, then dispatch. Each planned visit becomes a task assigned to the vehicle’s driver.

Parameters

Parameters are the inputs the optimization uses to find the best result. You set them on the visit, on the vehicle or in the configuration. Each one is either:

• a hard constraint: the result never breaks it, or
• a soft constraint: the result may break it when there is no fully feasible solution.

Parameter	What it does	Set in	Type
Time window	When in the day a visit can be served.	Visit	Hard
Visit time	How long the visit takes, in minutes.	Visit	Hard
Tag	Visits are served by vehicles with the same tags.	Visit, Vehicle	Hard
Capacity constraint	What each visit needs and the minimum and maximum each vehicle carries.	Visit, Vehicle	Minimum soft, maximum hard
Working time	When in the day a vehicle may work.	Vehicle	Hard
Cost factor	Which vehicles are used first, 0 to 100. 0 is used first.	Vehicle	Hard
Auto speed	Speed from historical data, or a speed you set per vehicle (km/h).	Vehicle, Configuration	Hard
Return to hub	Vehicles end their trip at the hub, within their working time. Otherwise the trip ends at the last visit.	Configuration	Hard
Multi trip	A vehicle may go back to the hub to reload and start another trip the same day.	Configuration	Soft
Clustering	Reduce the overlap between the areas of different vehicles.	Configuration	Soft
Use all vehicle	Use every vehicle instead of the fewest.	Configuration	Soft
Auto split	Split a visit larger than any matching vehicle’s capacity into several visits.	Configuration	Soft
Auto merge	Keep visits with the same coordinate on one vehicle.	Configuration	Soft
Visit group and priority	Visits of a group stay on one vehicle, ordered by priority (lower first).	Visit	Hard

Time window

The time window says when a visit can and should be served, usually so a delivery or pickup happens before the place closes. It sets clear expectations and reduces uncertainty.

Example: a store opens at 8 AM and closes at 5 PM. Set the visit’s open time to 08:00 – 17:00 and the visit is only planned in that range.

Set it in Open Time on the Visit page. A visit can have several windows.

Visit time

How long the vehicle stays at the visit before leaving for the next one, often called unloading time. Set it in Duration on the Visit page. When a visit has none, the configuration’s Default Visit Time is used, plus any Dynamic Visit Time.

Tag

Tags say which vehicle may serve a visit: a visit only goes to a vehicle that has all of its tags.

• Road class: tag visits by the size of road that reaches them (small, medium, big) and give vehicles the matching tags.
• Dedicated vehicles: tag cash-on-delivery vehicles and visits COD so they are matched together.

Set tags on the visit and on the vehicle. Geotagging can tag visits by area for you.

Capacity constraint

Capacity decides whether a vehicle can carry the orders. You can measure it in any unit: weight, volume, packs, boxes, frozen weight, chilled weight and so on.

1. Define the constraints and their units in Configuration › Speed & capacity.
2. Set each vehicle’s minimum and maximum. The maximum is a hard rule; the minimum is soft.
3. Set how much each visit needs. An empty value counts as 0.

A profile can use up to 10 constraints. See Capacity Constraint.

Working time

The hours a vehicle may work. No visit is planned outside them, and with Return to Hub the drive back must fit too. A working time can span several days, to plan multi-day routes in one run. See Vehicle.

Cost factor

A cost multiplier that sets which vehicles are used first. With vehicle A at 1 and vehicle B at 10, using B counts as ten times more expensive. Give your own fleet a low cost (0) and vendor vehicles a higher one (10), and your own fleet is used first. See Vehicle.

Auto speed

With Auto Speed, each vehicle’s speed is estimated from historical trips in the area. With Manual Speed, you set the speed in km/h, per vehicle or as a default, for example to assume slower traffic than usual. Set it in Configuration › Speed & capacity.

When Auto Speed is on, the vehicles’ Speed field is locked.

Dynamic routing

Visits that already belong to a vehicle from an earlier, dispatched result keep that vehicle when you optimize again. They show a truck icon on the Visit page. New visits added after the optimization are placed around them, so routes already on the road are not reshuffled. See How to Use › Adding a task.

Data retention

Routing results, their history and dispatch results are kept for 1 year from when they are created, then deleted automatically. Export the routing data you need to keep longer.