And when you do, you’ll not only save yourself the headache, you might also reclaim one to two hours of your life. Using commercial route optimization software, anyone can plan delivery routes. We'll expand on this concept further in the section on Intelligent Route Optimization.

What’s more, there are soft human considerations to route optimization that are also important to keep your drivers happy. For one, academic papers describe routes on a blank piece of paper (called a Cartesian plane) whereas real delivery drivers need to follow the road network, with varying traffic patterns throughout the day and week. And finally, the algorithms needed to account for real-world factors, because the real world is much more complex than the academic world (unfortunately). Fast-forward a decade, now there are many good software options on the market – here’s a review of the Best Route Optimization Software in 2023. Existing solutions in 2012 were very complicated for people without a background in Computer Science to get started with. ‍ Secondly, we developed an easy-to-use web application that anyone can learn in minutes – as we’ll see in the section Getting started with route optimization. But even today, it is still a relatively little-known term. We started marketing the term in earnest in 2015 and you can see on Google Trends that the term Route Optimization has increased 300% in popularity as compared to 2010. The few commercial routing softwares that existed before us called themselves “TSP and VRP solvers” or “Multi-stop Routing and Scheduling Optimizers” to name a few. First, we needed to tackle the branding problem so we coined the term Route Optimization back in 2012 to consolidate the various academic terms being used at the time. We wanted to bring the power of route optimization to small and medium businesses in an easy and accessible way.

Large corporations like UPS or FedEx have spent billions employing huge teams of academics to develop their own in-house algorithms trying to find the best routes.

Optimizer 16.2 for windows instal free