route optimization Archives

My Free Route Optimizer Now Tracks Three Capacities

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.

Vehicles sheet with capacity1, capacity2, capacity3, and route_time_limit columns

How Route Optimization Algorithms Actually Work

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.”

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.

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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.

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How to Plan a Delivery Route (the Way a Solver Does It)

Ask ten small fleets how to plan a delivery route and nine will describe some version of the same ritual: a list of addresses, a map, and somebody’s gut feeling about which order “makes sense.” I’ve spent years building routing models for real operations, and the gap between a gut-feel route and an optimized one is rarely small — it’s usually measured in whole driver-hours per day. The good news: planning delivery routes properly is a repeatable process, and most of it isn’t even math. It’s preparation.