or-tools-series Archives

Pickup and Delivery Route Optimization (Free Tool)

If you’ve ever tried to plan a pickup and delivery route by hand — grab a package here, drop it there, then double back across town for the next pickup — you’ve felt how fast it stops being a map problem and turns into a logic puzzle. Every delivery depends on a pickup happening first, every vehicle has a limit, and every stop has a window when it can actually happen. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool anyone can use. Here’s what makes pickup and delivery routing genuinely hard, and how to stop solving it by guesswork.

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RouteXL Alternatives: Free Multi-Stop Route Planners

I spent twenty-plus years building vehicle routing models for companies that paid serious money for them, so when I went looking at RouteXL alternatives recently, I wasn’t shopping — I was checking out the neighborhood. RouteXL is probably the best-known free multi-stop route planner on the internet, and for good reason: paste in your addresses, get them back in a sensible order, free up to 20 stops. But 20 stops is exactly where a lot of real delivery days start, and that’s where the free tier ends. This post is an honest tour of what’s out there — including the free VRP tool I built and run myself — and which one fits which kind of routing problem.

What’s Next: 20 More Models Waiting in Excel

The staff scheduler took about 20 years to build.

That’s not as dramatic as it sounds. The MILP model — the math, the constraints, the logic — that came together during the Fiverr engagement described in the first post of this series. What took 20 years was accumulating enough Operations Research experience to know what the model needed to look like. The actual build, once I sat down with the problem fully understood, was fast.

The web app took a few days. The deployment took an afternoon, plus one failed attempt that taught me about gunicorn.

From Localhost to the Internet: Deploying for $7/Month

The app was working. On my laptop. Which is the same as not working, for most purposes.

If the goal was to keep it to myself — test it occasionally, tinker with it, update the model when I felt like it — a working local copy would be enough. But that’s not what I built it for. The point of converting these models to web apps is that they can run anywhere, for anyone, without requiring someone to have Python installed and know how to use a terminal.

So: deployment.

Three Files. One Web App. Zero Web Development Experience.

At some point during this project I stepped back and looked at what we’d built.

Three files. A working web application. Deployable for $7 a month. Zero web development experience going in.

That felt worth writing down.