Route Optimization Solutions
Route optimization (also called routing optimization) decides which vehicle or worker takes each stop and in what order. It goes beyond finding the quickest path from A to B: plans have to respect working hours, customer time windows, vehicle capacity, skills, and road restrictions.
With the Route Planner API, you send your agents and jobs in one request and get back optimized routes and schedules. Contact us for a consultation, and our experts will help you find the best solution for your business case.
Any business whose employees need to travel regularly can benefit from route optimization:
- Delivery and logistics companies
- Food delivery businesses
- Service providers such as garden maintenance or building repairs
- Trainers that deliver in-person workshops
- Home care providers
- Waste collection services
- Transit service providers
And many more. Sales teams can use our route optimization solutions to make sure they're covering their territory most efficiently. Ride-sharing services can use it to plan their pickup and dropoff routes, and managers who need to travel to multiple offices can plan the best way.
Why Is Route Optimization Important?
Travel costs are a heavy burden on any business. Fuel costs represent as much as 24% of overall costs for motor carriers. Route optimization means you get the best mileage for your money, keeping fuel costs as low as practically possible. Route optimization also helps businesses make the best of their most valuable asset: Their people. With route optimization, you can make the best use of your employees’ time.
Take The Guesswork Out Of Route Planning
Our Route Optimization API takes the guesswork out of route planning for yourself, management, or your team. You can apply an approximated traffic model and route restrictions to make sure every route is fit for use.
For example, you can avoid toll roads, highways, ferries, or specific locations, or choose a truck mode, from light_truck (3.5 t, 3.2 m) to heavy_truck (40 t, 4.1 m), so routes respect your vehicles' weight and height limits. Figuring out routes manually takes a lot of time and effort, which prevents you from carrying out other tasks. Not to mention the risk of human error leads to frustration, wasted time, and more money paid on fuel. Using Geoapify saves you all that time and effort, and delivers routes that are up-to-date and accurate.
Route Optimization Helps Boost Employee Morale
As well as saving time and money, optimizing routes helps boost employee satisfaction. With employee turnover costing businesses in the US alone a staggering $1 trillion yearly, employee satisfaction is important to your bottom line.
Workload is a leading cause of employee stress, which is a key reason employees leave their jobs. Creating optimal routes reduces stress by making sure employees arrive at the right place, at the right time, equipped with the right equipment.
Route Optimization Solutions: Key Use Cases
Discover how route optimization solutions can streamline operations across various industries. Below are some of the most common use cases where efficient route planning can make a significant impact:
1. Plan the most effective vehicle route
Let's talk for a moment about the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and why it matters to your business. The traveling salesman problem asks the question, “what is the shortest route a salesman could take between a number of cities that must be visited, before returning to their point of origin?”
This problem doesn't only apply to salesmen, but to any situation where a vehicle needs to make multiple stops and then return to home base or another location. Consultants who need to visit several businesses in a day need to solve this problem. Holiday makers need to solve it so they can plan the best itinerary.
Anyone who needs to hit a certain number of stops, needs to do so in the most efficient way. Efficient might mean the shortest length, the shortest time, or a combination. Geoapify can help you with both.
Geoapify goes beyond just distance or time, and lets you plan breaks into each working day, such as rest stops or lunch, with time windows when they can take place. Our Route Optimization API (Route Planner API) calculates optimal routes, and can also rearrange waypoints to find the best route. For routes of electric vehicles, see EV routing.
2. Create efficient delivery routes
When you have a fleet of vehicles that needs to reach multiple locations, it's important to build the most efficient route for them. This is known as the Vehicle Routing Problem, which asks the question “what is the optimal set of routes for several vehicles to take in order to reach a given set of customers?”
When you're dealing with several vehicles traveling to different locations, you want to find both the optimal distribution of tasks among the drivers, and the best route for each individual vehicle.
Any business that manages a fleet of vehicles can benefit from vehicle route optimization, including postal services, food delivery, repair services, waste collection and public transit. Calculating the most efficient route helps businesses like yours reduce travel costs for your fleet, and maximize delivery drivers' time.
Geoapify lets you factor in parameters such as employee working hours, vehicle capacity restrictions, and vehicle height and weight. You can also take into account required skills for employees to go to specific locations, for example repair teams that need more experienced repair people to take on certain jobs.
With our route optimization solutions you can construct routes for driving, trucking, walking, or cycling.
3. Build schedules that work for your business
If your business has multiple workers visiting multiple customers, it's important to plan the best order to visit those customers for maximum use of time and resources. More efficient schedules mean happier customers. With nearly half of customers saying they're unlikely to order again from a business that delivered their package late, arriving on time matters.
Schedule optimization is vital for repair and maintenance teams, social help workers, sales teams, and any other team where multiple employees are visiting multiple customers.
Businesses often need to take into account a range of factors when using an API for delivery route optimization, including employee working hours, opening hours, which customers take priority, and whether each stopping point requires the worker to have specific skills or tools.
Geoapify solves the problem of building the most efficient schedule for your team. You can use it to define order of priority, and allow for desired hours, working hours and breaks, worker capacities, and task requirements. Geoapify lets you build highly customized schedules that work for your business. Try schedule optimization for free right now on the Geoapify API Playground.
Constraints You Can Model with the Route Planner API
Real route optimization tasks come with rules. The Route Planner API takes them as parameters of agents (vehicles or workers), jobs, and shipments in a single POST https://api.geoapify.com/v1/routeplanner request:
| Business rule | Route Planner parameter |
|---|---|
| Working hours of a driver or worker | agent time_windows |
| Lunch or rest breaks | agent breaks with a duration and allowed time_windows |
| Customer delivery or visit slots | job time_windows |
| Time spent at each stop | job duration |
| Skills, tools, or vehicle equipment | agent capabilities matched to job requirements |
| Vehicle load limits | agent delivery_capacity / pickup_capacity with job or shipment amounts |
| Pick up at one address, deliver to another | shipments with pickup and delivery |
| Urgent jobs first | job priority (0–100) |
| No tolls, ferries, highways, or specific places | avoid |
| Vehicle type, weight, and height | mode, for example light_truck or heavy_truck |
Each task is billed in credits based on the number of unique locations: n × min(n, 10). For example, 2 couriers and 7 jobs are 9 locations, so the task costs 81 credits; avoid rules and very long routes add a few more (see Route Planner pricing). The Free plan includes 3,000 credits per day.
To see a complete request and response, check the multi-stop route optimization example or try your own data in the Route Planner Playground.
Explore Our APIs for Efficient Route Solutions
Discover the APIs that power efficient route planning, distance calculations, and GPS-based navigation for a wide range of optimization needs:
Need to calculate the fastest or shortest route between locations?
Our Routing API allows you to compute the fastest or shortest path between multiple points, with support for various travel modes like driving, walking, and cycling.
Need to estimate time and distance for deliveries or service stops?
With the Route Matrix API, you can generate time and distance matrices for up to 1000 location pairs in a single request, streamlining complex logistics operations.
Route Optimization Guides
These guides show how to model typical route optimization tasks with the Route Planner API, with ready-to-run examples.
Model the task
Describe your work as jobs, shipments, or both.
- Choose between jobs and shipmentsBeginner7 min
- Optimize pickup and delivery routesIntermediate9 min
Add constraints
Keep plans within vehicle, driver, and road limits.
- Respect vehicle capacity limitsIntermediate10 min
- Match jobs to driver skillsIntermediate8 min
- Avoid tolls, highways, ferries, and placesIntermediate9 min
Work with the plan
Read the result and adjust it after optimization.
- Read an optimized route planIntermediate10 min
- Edit a plan with the Geoapify SDKIntermediate12 min
Conclusion
Geoapify offers scalable and flexible Route Optimization Solutions that take into account your business' needs. We also offer a Matrix API if you would like to implement and use your own optimization solutions. We offer affordable pricing for businesses of every size. Our team can help you find the solution you need. Get in touch with us today.
FAQ
What is route optimization?
Route optimization, also called routing optimization, assigns stops to vehicles or workers and puts them in the best order under real constraints, such as working hours, time windows, capacities, and skills. The Route Planner API solves these tasks, from the Traveling Salesman Problem to vehicle routing with capacities, time windows, and pickup-and-delivery pairs.
What is the difference between routing and route optimization?
Routing calculates a path through waypoints in the order you give: that's the Routing API. Route optimization decides which agent visits which stop and in what order, then builds the routes: that's the Route Planner API. Many applications use both.
How do I choose route optimization software?
Start from your constraints and check that the tool supports them: time windows, vehicle capacity, skills, breaks, pickup-and-delivery pairs, and truck restrictions. Then compare the number of vehicles and stops per request, an API versus a ready-made UI, the pricing model, map data coverage, and whether you can adjust a plan after optimization. Test with your own data, for example in the Route Planner Playground.
Which constraints does the Geoapify Route Planner API support?
Agent working hours and breaks, job and shipment time windows and durations, capacities and amounts, capabilities and requirements, priorities, pickup and delivery shipments, avoid rules, traffic model, and travel modes including trucks. See the API reference.
How much does route optimization cost with Geoapify?
A task costs n × min(n, 10) credits, where n is the number of unique locations: 2 couriers and 7 jobs cost 81 credits. Avoid rules and routes longer than 500 km add credits, and batch jobs are billed at half price. The Free plan includes 3,000 credits per day; see pricing.
Can I try route optimization without writing code?
Yes. The Route Planner Playground lets you run popular route optimization scenarios on a map and generate the request objects for your own tasks.