Home / Solutions / Routing and field service
Planning task
Route planning decides which vehicle or person serves which jobs, in which order. Optimized means: time windows and skills are kept, travel times come from the real road network, and the plan is recalculated when a job is added or cancelled.
Rules in the model
From practice
Project example
Dime Software: software for installation and trade businesses
Use cases
Every case plays in your browser: the plan in time-lapse, with KPIs and the comparison to the usual way of planning.
07:00Eight technicians, 29 home installations, arrival windows and skills, planned on the real roads around Windhagen.
15:00Two combines from 10:00, rain from 16:00, two grain carts to the silo. The goal is the most crop value harvested before the weather turns.
01:00Bookings from the last trains, the village pub and between villages. Three minibuses pool the rides home on real roads.
06:15Ambient, chilled and frozen orders for 28 stores on diesel and electric trucks. Loading order, store access, range and charging planned together.
06:30A home care service with 42 clients and 14 carers. One week of tours with morning and evening peaks, split shifts, six pool cars and few different carers per client.
WeeksThree sales reps, 80 practices and three product lines. Every specialty gets its target visits at the practices’ reception hours, with little driving.
06:00Snow starts at 03:30. Three spreader trucks plough and salt 61 km of real roads around Windhagen, the main roads by 06:00.
12:2080 households booked a pickup for today, in the morning or in the afternoon. Four trucks collect in the booked windows and unload at the recycling yard when they are full.
07:1016 truck mixers bring 786 m³ from two plants to 12 construction sites. Every pour should run without a break, and the concrete must be placed within 90 minutes.
07:30Six vans, 314 deliveries and 64 pickups in one day. Every stop in its window and no van over capacity at any point of the tour.
WeeksFour product tankers, two refineries and five tank farms around a fictional sea, three weeks with a cold spell and a storm. Which ship calls where, how much it loads or discharges and how fast it sails, so no tank farm runs dry.
01:45About 120 dough batches, seven kneaders, four make-up lines, eleven ovens and 15 tours that leave between 01:45 and 05:30. Dough cannot wait, so the order of the doughs decides the night.
Approach
Stage 1Clarify
DecisionIs it worth it?
Stage 2Build
DecisionDoes the pilot deliver what it promised?
Stage 3Run
CycleWhen operations change, we adapt the rules and the plan.
Questions
Yes. Routes and travel times come from a road network such as OpenStreetMap, not from straight lines.
Yes. The Timefold SaaS models offer field service and delivery routing as a service. When your rules go further, we build a model of your own.
Yes. New jobs, cancellations and delays are planned in without turning the whole day upside down.
The first step
In a free first call we work out which next step is really worth it.
