Forced Routes

In some cases, one may have a routing problem where the sequence of stops is already known and only the desired travel times, polylines, and driving directions are desired. In the first example, we have only a single vehicle with a single shift and we force it to visit a sequence of stops. Note that it would be very easy to add more stops to this route, but no optimization is done in this case. One important note is that the sequence of stops must be feasible for the associated shift – in other words, if the optimization engine computes the travel time and determines that it is not possible to visit the provided sequence of stops within the time for the shift, then no route is returned. In this case, a simple solution may be to increase the length of the shift.

The sequence of stops could be made more efficient but no re-ordering of a forced route is allowed.

In this example, we force the routes for all four shifts. Note that breaks can be incorporated but again the sequence of stops in the route cannot be changed.