The free vehicle routing optimizer at routing.kindoflost.com used to think about a vehicle’s capacity as a single number. Fine for a lot of routes, but real fleets rarely run out of just one thing. A cargo van can be full on volume with plenty of weight capacity left, or maxed out on weight while the cargo area still has room, or simply out of pallet slots. I added a fix: the tool now supports three independent vehicle capacity constraints per route, plus a route time limit you can set per vehicle instead of one setting for the whole fleet.
Here’s what changed and why it’s not just a spreadsheet formatting exercise.
The short version
- Vehicle capacity is no longer one number — you can track up to three independent limits per route (weight, volume, pallet count, or whatever three things actually constrain your fleet).
- Route time can now be capped per vehicle, not just once for the whole fleet.
- Both are optional. Leave the new columns blank and the tool behaves exactly like it did before.
Capacity used to be one number. Now it can be three.
The locations sheet has always had a demand column — how much of the vehicle’s capacity each stop consumes. That still works exactly as before if that’s all you need. But now there’s demand1, demand2, and demand3, and on the vehicles sheet, matching columns capacity1, capacity2, and capacity3. Each dimension is tracked and enforced independently — a route can be completely full on capacity2 while capacity1 and capacity3 still have room, and the solver respects all three at once.
Use them however your fleet actually works. Weight in one, volume or cubic feet in another, pallet or bin count in the third. Only the first dimension is required — leave demand2, demand3, capacity2, or capacity3 blank and that dimension simply doesn’t count against any route. A one-dimension fleet fills in one column and never sees the other two; a fleet juggling weight and volume and container count fills in all three.
A route time limit per vehicle, not just one for the fleet
The parameters sheet has a RouteTimeLimit setting that caps how long any route can run — a shift limit, not a distance limit. That’s still there and still the default. What’s new is a route_time_limit column on the vehicles sheet itself, so a specific vehicle can get a shorter (or longer) shift than the rest of the fleet. Leave it blank on a given vehicle and it falls back to the global setting; fill it in only for the vehicles that actually need something different, like a part-time driver or a truck that has to be back for a second job.
Nothing you already have breaks
If your workbook only ever used demand and capacity, it still works without touching a thing — those are read as the first dimension, same as always. The new columns are additions, not replacements, and a blank cell in any of them means “doesn’t apply here,” not zero and not an error. I did tighten one thing while I was in there: the vehicles sheet is read by column position (not by header name, the way locations is), so I added a check that the column headers are in the expected order. If they’re not, you now get a specific error telling you what’s wrong instead of the tool quietly misreading a column and handing back routes based on the wrong numbers. A silent miscalculation is worse than a loud error, and I’d rather you see the second one. That check only applies to the vehicles sheet — locations is still matched by header name, in English or Spanish, in whatever order you put the columns.
Why one number was never really enough
I heard about this gap the way I hear about most of them — someone tried to model a real fleet and the tool got in the way. Their delivery vans could be full by volume with a lot of payload capacity still on the table, and a single “capacity” number couldn’t represent that; whichever limit they entered, the other one was either ignored or wrongly enforced. That’s the ordinary shape of a real constrained-vehicle problem: weight and volume don’t run out at the same rate, and a fleet that loads by pallet has a third limit that has nothing to do with either one. Modeling them as one blended number either wastes capacity or overloads a truck on the dimension you didn’t check. Under the hood this uses OR-Tools’ per-vehicle capacity dimensions, the same mechanism used for a single capacity, just applied three times over instead of once — the solver enforces all three simultaneously rather than picking one to honor. It’s not a fundamentally new algorithm, just a more honest model of what “full” actually means for a real truck, and that honesty is exactly what determines whether the routes it hands back are ones a dispatcher can actually load and send out.
This is part of the same ongoing series where I take old Operations Research models public one at a time — I covered the basics of the underlying problem in What Is VRP? The Vehicle Routing Problem, Explained, and the last round of upgrades — address geocoding, Google Sheets input, early-stopping — is in My Free Vehicle Routing Optimizer Just Got Smarter. The engine itself is Google’s OR-Tools, genuinely industrial-grade software, wrapped in a page so you don’t have to install anything or write code.
The sample workbook on the tool’s home page and its alternate layout already reflects all of this — download it, and the three capacity columns and the per-vehicle route time limit column are right there with realistic example values, not just described in a help sheet. If you’re only tracking one thing, ignore the extra columns and nothing changes for you. If you’re not, they’re finally there. Try it: routing.kindoflost.com. You can read the rest of the VRP series here.
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