Your stops
Name, service minutes and the window are optional. In Google Maps, right-click a place and click the coordinates to copy them. Times can be 9, 9:30, 9am or 13:30. Put stops in the order you would drive them today: that is the baseline the savings are measured against.
Upload or paste your stops, then click the button.
Result
The routes
Map
Positions are plotted as latitude and longitude with no basemap. Numbers are the visit order.
Against your current order
| Plan | Road miles | Hours (drive + wait + service) | Fuel + labor |
|---|
How it is calculated
Travel: straight-line (haversine) distance between stops times your road factor, at your average speed. Elapsed time: driving, plus waiting when you arrive before a window opens, plus service minutes. Objective: least elapsed time with every window met; if no order can meet them all, lateness is minimised first. Solution: up to 12 stops on one route are solved exactly with a Held-Karp dynamic programme (checked against brute-force search in the tests); beyond that, and with several drivers, the tool runs multi-start nearest-neighbour with 2-opt and Or-opt improvement and moves stops between drivers, balancing the longest day against total time. Savings: your pasted order on the same model, with fuel from miles per gallon and labor from elapsed hours.
Not modelled: the real road network, one-way streets, live traffic, vehicle capacity, driver breaks and shift limits, pickup-before-drop-off ordering, and turn-by-turn directions. Unverified: checked against brute-force search on small problems and against invented data in unit tests, not against real routes or a navigation service.
Common questions
What is the best order to visit several stops?
The order that minimises total driving plus waiting time while meeting any customer time windows. For a handful of stops you can find it exactly by checking every order in a smart way; for dozens of stops no shortcut is known, so good tools use heuristics. This tool solves up to 12 stops on one route exactly and uses 2-opt and Or-opt improvement beyond that.
How do I get latitude and longitude for my stops?
In Google Maps, right-click a place and click the coordinates at the top of the menu to copy them; on a phone, long-press the map and read the pin. Many customer and dispatch systems also export coordinates. Paste one stop per row as name, latitude, longitude.
How are drive times estimated without a map service?
Straight-line distance between two points, multiplied by a road factor (1.3 by default, since roads are longer than straight lines) and divided by your average speed. It is an estimate: it ranks orders well, but it will not match a navigation app minute for minute and it cannot see rivers, one-way streets or traffic.
How do customer time windows work?
Give an opening time, a closing time, or both for a stop. Arriving early means waiting until the window opens; arriving after it closes counts as late. The tool finds an order with no late stops if one exists, and tells you which stops are late if none does.
Can it split stops between several drivers?
Yes, up to 20. Stops are grouped by direction from the depot, then moved between drivers when that shortens the plan, balancing the longest day against total time. Each driver's route is then ordered separately.
How is the saving calculated?
The tool compares your plan with the order you pasted the stops in, on the same travel model. Miles are converted to fuel cost with your miles per gallon and fuel price, and elapsed time to labor cost with your hourly wage; multiply by the days you run the route per year for an annual figure.
Is my customer list uploaded anywhere?
No. Stops are read and solved in this browser tab. Nothing is sent to a server, there are no accounts or cookies, and the tool does not store your list. The Open in Google Maps links send nothing until you click them, and then only the coordinates in that link.