Route Optimizer

Route Optimizer takes your stops and your fleet and returns a plan: every delivery assigned to a vehicle, every run sequenced, priced on road distances and held inside capacity, time-window and driver-shift limits.

Open the optimizer

In the left rail, under Tools, click Route Optimizer. The command palette entry is Go to Route Optimizer.

The welcome screen

The first visit lands on a welcome screen: what the optimizer does, the constraints it works inside — Multi-depot, Time windows, Driver shifts, Real road distances — and three sample metric cards, Sample plan cost, Sample fleet distance and Sample cut vs hand-plan. Those three are illustrative, not a solved result; the screen says so, and adds that your own runs are priced by your vehicle rates as a planning estimate, never a carrier invoice. Open the Route Optimizer → goes in.

Show this welcome screen decides whether it comes back: Every time, First visit only (the default), or Never. Picking Never notes that "You can still open it any time from the command palette."

Plan from a workbook

The optimizer opens on three columns: the controls on the left, the map in the middle, the results on the right.

Read the results

The results column heads with the solution status and four stats: Total cost, Distance, Routes (used against available) and Served (served against total). Anything the fleet could not cover is called out as an unserved block naming each delivery — the shortfall to price against another vehicle or a looser constraint.

Below that, one collapsible row per vehicle: its stop count and distance, and expanded, each stop in sequence with its arrival time and the depot marked.

Two cards carry the write-up. Executive summary states the plan in a paragraph, including whether distances followed real roads. Assumptions — "What this solve assumed — objective, distances, fleet" — lists the Objective, the Distance source, the Fleet available, the time budget the search was given, and whether Driver breaks were enforced.

The map is explicit about its own lines. A chip reads follows real roads when every route was measured on the road network, "N of M routes follow real roads — rest straight lines" when only some were, or "straight lines (road service unreachable)" when none were. If the map imagery itself is not available you get Map imagery is unavailable and Retry the map — the solve is unaffected, and the routes, stops and totals in the panel are all still there.

Export a plan

Four exports sit under the results: Stops, Routes, Full plan and Shipping.

Saved plans

Every standalone run is saved under Recent route plans, which appears once you have one. A row offers Open this route plan on the map, Rename this plan and Delete this plan.

Plan from a solved scenario

Switch the control rail to From scenario to build the routing problem out of a model instead of a workbook. Pick a Network model and a Solved scenario, then set the fleet under Fleet (per depot): Vehicles (default 3) and Capacity — leave capacity on auto to size it from the demand. Bridge & solve builds the stops from what the scenario decided to ship and solves them.

When a bridged run has a result, Apply to scenario appears in the map header. It writes the routed cost back to the source scenario as a new what-if and takes you to that model's Scenarios screen, so the routing number feeds the bigger decision.

Limits