Where the trucks drive
Each line is a city-to-city lane; thicker = more trips. Hover a lane for details.
Empty miles by home base
Share of each city's miles driven with an empty trailer. Lower is better.
Trucks on the road through the week
How many trucks are out on a tour, and how many are hauling a load right now.
Loads by trailer type
Delivered vs. left uncovered. Hover a bar for counts.
Loads the plan does not cover
Every load in the week is listed here if no truck takes it, with the reason in plain language.
| Load | Lane | Trailer | Priority | Miles | Rate | Pickup window | Why it's uncovered |
|---|
What this tool does
It plans one week of work for the whole fleet. It decides which truck hauls which load, in what order, so the fleet drives as few empty miles as possible while still covering as many loads as it can.
A truck can take any number of loads in any order, as long as every rule below holds. Each plan is checked against the rules before it is shown.
The rules every route follows
- Back home. Every truck ends its tour at its own home terminal, within its allowed tour length (3, 5 or 7 days).
- Right trailer. Reefer loads go on reefers, flatbed on flatbeds, and so on. The weight fits.
- On time. Pickups happen inside the pickup window and deliveries by the deadline. Docks are only visited while they are open.
- Driver hours (HOS). At most 11 h driving and a 14 h duty window per shift. A 30 min break after 8 h of driving, and 10 h off between shifts. A 70 h weekly cycle. Team trucks can run longer.
- One truck per load. No load is double-booked.
How the plan is found
- Build a first plan. Loads are taken in pickup order. Each goes to the truck where it adds the least cost: a truck that is already nearby, or that will be heading home.
- Improve it, thousands of times. The optimizer repeatedly pulls out a group of related loads, such as all loads around one city on one day, or a few poor routes. It re-inserts them in the cheapest way and keeps the change if the whole plan got better.
- Compare. The same week is also planned the "naive" way: each load goes to the closest free truck. That gives a fair yardstick.
What "cost" means here
Operating cost per mile, plus a penalty for every empty mile (default $3.50/mi) to push toward full trailers. Waiting time and lateness are charged too. Leaving a load uncovered costs its lost revenue plus a service penalty, scaled by priority and by the chance the load gets cancelled. You can change these in Settings.