People hear “route optimization algorithm” and picture something exotic — a black box, maybe a little AI magic. It isn’t. Underneath every routing tool, mine included, is a decades-old idea from combinatorial search, dressed up with a few tricks to make it fast enough to run in your browser instead of overnight on a mainframe. I’ve spent twenty-plus years building these models for real fleets, and the algorithm part is the least mysterious piece of the whole system. Here’s what’s actually happening when you click “optimize.”
Continue reading “How Route Optimization Algorithms Actually Work”Tag: operations research
Do You Need a Route Optimization API?
Every so often someone emails me asking for a route optimization API — they want to hit an endpoint from their own app, get routes back as JSON, and skip the whole “upload a spreadsheet” workflow entirely. Fair ask. But before you go shopping for one, it’s worth understanding what you’re actually paying for, because “API” in this space covers everything from a thin wrapper around a free library to a genuinely expensive enterprise platform.
Dynamic Route Planning Software, Explained
“Dynamic route planning software” gets thrown around as a marketing word more than a technical one, and it’s worth pinning down what it actually means before you pay for it. I’ve built routing models for real operations for over twenty years, and the honest answer is: dynamic isn’t a feature you either have or don’t — it’s a spectrum, and most businesses searching for it don’t actually need the far end of it.
Continue reading “Dynamic Route Planning Software, Explained”
Deputy Alternative: Free Staff Scheduling, No Per-User Fee
The search for a Deputy alternative almost always starts the same way: the roster grows, the per-user fee grows with it, and someone asks whether a scheduling tool should really cost as much as a part-time shift. After twenty-plus years building optimization models professionally, I built my own answer — my free staff scheduling optimizer — and made it free: no per-user fee, no account, and a real solver doing the actual scheduling work.
When I Work Alternative: A Free Scheduling Optimizer
Most people hunting for a When I Work alternative aren’t angry at the product — they’re doing per-user math. Multiply a monthly fee by every employee on the roster, add the time-tracking add-on, and a “cheap” tool quietly becomes a real line item. I’ve built scheduling optimization models for twenty-plus years, and my answer to that math is my free staff scheduling optimizer: it costs nothing, needs no account, and — unlike most scheduling apps — it actually builds the schedule instead of giving you a nicer grid to fill by hand.
