Joint Pickup And Dropoff Route Optimization With Address Pairs

Route4Me’s pickup and dropoff optimization is designed for such businesses as non-emergency medical transport dispatch (NEMT), food delivery, courier deliveries, and many other last-mile businesses. Instead of planning one pickup and dropoff trip at a time, Route4Me’s proprietary optimization algorithm allows you to import hundreds of thousands of address pairs into the system and get the most optimal number of pickup and dropoff routes for the most optimal number of drivers in seconds. Furthermore, with Route4Me’s joint pickup and dropoff optimization, you can plan and optimize routes with pick-up and drop-off address pairs where each pick-up address will always be followed by its corresponding drop-off address without any stops in between. Thus, you can make sure that you never have more than one passenger or package in the vehicle and that the current passenger or package onboard must be dropped off before the next passenger or package can be picked up.

To plan routes with joint pick-up and drop-off address pairs, first, go to “Plan New Route” from the navigation menu and then select the “Upload a File” route planning option.

1. Next, go to the “Optimization” tab;
2. Select the  Single Driver Route, Multiple Drivers Route, or Balanced Team Route optimization type. It is recommended to select the Multiple Drivers Route optimization type so that Route4Me can plan multiple routes from the imported addresses if required;
3. Choose where you want each optimized route to end.

After that, specify the rest of the route parameters to your preference and then click on the “Create Route and Proceed to Add Addresses” button.

Next, upload the spreadsheet with joint pick-up and drop-off address pairs into your Route4Me account. For the spreadsheet to be successfully processed, it must contain a Header Row and Data Rows. The Header Row defines the type of information you are importing, while the corresponding Data Rows contain the actual data that is being imported into the system. In addition to the obligatory “Address” column, you can also include other data columns with Route4Me’s reserved attributes and custom data. To learn more about Route4Me’s spreadsheet requirements, visit this page.

To enable the joint pickup and dropoff route optimization, the spreadsheet you are importing must contain the “Pickup,” “Dropoff,” and “Joint” columns. To create an address pair where one address will be visited for a pickup and the second address will be visited for a dropoff, this address pair must have the same unique custom-defined ID in the “Pickup” and “Dropoff” columns. For a particular pick-up and drop-off address pair to be joint, you need to add the same custom value (i.e., “1”) for both addresses in the “Joint” column. If you want all pick-up and drop-off address pairs on the route to be joint, specify the same custom value for all address pairs in the “Joint” column in the spreadsheet.

NOTE: Joint pick-up and drop-off address pairs are the pick-up and drop-off address pairs in which a given pick-up address is always followed by its corresponding drop-off address without any stops in between.

After uploading the spreadsheet, Route4Me will automatically process the imported data and display it in the corresponding window. Make sure that all columns contain the correct data and meet the following spreadsheet requirements:

1. An address pair must not have the same address marked as a pickup and dropoff;
2. Each pick-up and drop-off address pair/address field should have the correct pair count;
3. The route’s depot (start address) must not be marked as a pickup or as a dropoff;
4. A pick-up address must not be the last stop on the route (when locking the last destination);
5. In each pick-up and drop-off address pair, the pick-up address should always be placed before its corresponding drop-off address;
6. In each pick-up and drop-off address pair, the drop-off address should always be placed after its corresponding pick-up address;
7. Make sure that all other parameters of the Multiple Drivers Route optimization are set up correctly.

Click on the “Continue to Review” button to proceed.

Once the route is planned, all imported addresses will be sequenced in such a way that in each pick-up and drop-off address pair (marked with the predefined custom aliases), the pick-up address will always be visited first and its corresponding drop-off address will always be visited second. Furthermore, all joined pick-up and drop-off address pairs will be visited without any stops in between.

When using the regular pickup and dropoff optimization without joint address pairs, you can have multiple pickups before their corresponding dropoffs. To learn more about how to use the regular pickup and dropoff optimization (without joint address pairs), visit this page.

Thus, if the route with regular pick-up and drop-off address pairs is re-optimized as a route with joint pick-up and drop-off address pairs, then each pick-up address will be followed by its corresponding drop-off address without any stops in between. NOTE: If you want to insert new or delete the existing route stops from an optimized pick-up and drop-off route, you need to make the preferred modifications in the corresponding spreadsheet and then re-upload it to optimize a new route.