Concept

What route optimisation is, and why optimising one vehicle at a time is not enough

Most software stops at reordering the stops of a vehicle that already has its orders. Which vehicle gets which order is what decides the cost.

View from a truck driver's seat: hands on the wheel, a phone in a dashboard mount showing a map, and a two-lane road through rice fields with another truck ahead

The short definition

Route optimisation is the problem of serving a set of drop points with a set of vehicles at the lowest total cost, while honouring every constraint of the operation: pickup and delivery windows, payload, cargo dimensions, vehicle working hours, and where each vehicle starts.

In the academic literature this is the VRP family (Vehicle Routing Problem), if you want to read further.

Three tiers, and where buyers get misled

Three quite different jobs all get called route optimisation.

Stop sequencing

Fleet-wide assignment

Tier	What buyers usually call it	What gets decided	Who decides it today
Navigation	Open a map for the driver	The road between two points, for one vehicle	The driver, on the road
Stop sequencing	Reorder the route for each vehicle	The order of stops, after the orders have already been assigned to a vehicle	The dispatcher assigns, the software finishes the tail end
Fleet-wide assignment	Plan the whole day	How many vehicles run, which vehicle takes which order, from where, and only then the stop order	The dispatcher, from experience

Navigation
What buyers usually call it
Open a map for the driver
What gets decided
The road between two points, for one vehicle
Who decides it today
The driver, on the road
Stop sequencing
What buyers usually call it
Reorder the route for each vehicle
What gets decided
The order of stops, after the orders have already been assigned to a vehicle
Who decides it today
The dispatcher assigns, the software finishes the tail end
Fleet-wide assignment
What buyers usually call it
Plan the whole day
What gets decided
How many vehicles run, which vehicle takes which order, from where, and only then the stop order
Who decides it today
The dispatcher, from experience

Why assignment is the hard part

Stop-sequencing software only finishes the job after you have already assigned orders to vehicles. Assignment is where the money is lost.

When one vehicle's stops are reordered, its orders are already fixed. The expensive decisions came earlier: this order belonged on another vehicle, that vehicle did not need to run today, that order should have left from the nearer depot. The ways to assign orders grow explosively with every vehicle and order added, so even a very good planner cannot check them all by hand.

Route4Green takes the whole order list and vehicle list for a date in one call, up to 300 orders for one date and one transport mode, and returns a plan per vehicle plus the orders and vehicles it could not place. The unplaced list shows you the assignment really happened.

What changes as the fleet grows

With a handful of vehicles a dispatcher usually reaches a good plan and knows why. From a few dozen up, assigning by hand starts to break down: there are more order-to-vehicle combinations than one person can compare before dispatch. An observation, not a threshold: a ten-vehicle fleet running six waves a day hits the same wall.

The constraints the solution must honour

What the current API accepts and forwards to the core. Check it against your operation before you try.

Per order

Hard pickup and delivery windows, each with a start and an end
Loading and unloading time at the stop
Weight, length, width, height, and parcel count
Cargo type, matched against what a vehicle is allowed to carry

Per vehicle

Payload and box dimensions
Working window per vehicle
A separate start point per vehicle, so one solution can span several depots
Up to 200 vehicles in one job

Objectives of the solution

Shortest total distance
Fewest vehicles used
Balanced workload across vehicles
Time windows honoured first
A cap on the duration of one run

What does not exist yet

Four real industry constraints the API does not accept yet. If your operation depends on them, better to know now.

Soft time windows. Only hard windows exist: an order is inside its window or not placed.
Order priority. You cannot mark one order as more important than another.
Driver rosters. The solution works on vehicles, not on drivers and shifts.
City truck bans and restricted zones, as in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Today you still handle them outside Route4Green.

One Pilot, with measured figures

The figures measured in the VNPost Pilot in Ho Chi Minh City are on the results page, with their scope and how to read each one.

What a standard Pilot covers and measures Read the full Pilot results