Pickup and Dropoff Routing (No Time Windows) – Enterprise Architect

Route4Me’s Enterprise Architect is designed for geocoding and optimizing millions of points and producing the most efficient routes and address territories with hundreds of thousands of addresses in a smooth and quick manner. Depending on the particular needs of your business or unique business model, you may require not only visiting one stop at a time but also visiting two connected addresses where one address must be visited for picking up packages and the second one for dropping these packages off. For example, a delivery business needs to pick up goods at a specific warehouse and then deliver them to a particular store. Imagine if there are hundreds of different warehouses and hundreds of different stores and the goods from each warehouse must be delivered to a different store. With the Enterprise Architect, you can plan and optimize routes with hundreds of thousands of pickup and drop-off address pairs in which one address will be visited first for a pickup and the second address will be visited only after the first one for a drop-off.

To plan routes with pickup and drop-off address pairs, first, import the addresses that you want to use into the Enterprise Architect and then geocode them for the most efficient and accurate optimization. To geocode addresses, first, go to the “Addresses” tab and then import the addresses that you want to geocode by clicking on the “Import” button and then uploading the spreadsheet with addresses (in CSV format) from your device.

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 app. In addition to the obligatory “Address” column, you can also include other data columns with Route4Me’s reserved attributes (i.e., Revenue, Weight, etc.) and custom data. To learn more about Route4Me spreadsheet requirements, visit this page.

To enable pickup and drop-off route planning, the spreadsheet you are importing must contain the “Pickup” and “Dropoff” columns. To create an address pair where one address will be visited for picking up packages and the second address will be visited for dropping off the picked up packages, this address pair must have the same unique custom-defined ID in both columns (Pickup and Dropoff).

For example, if you want the “20 W 34th St” address to be visited for a pickup and the “405 Lexington Ave” address to be visited for a drop-off, first, you need to define the same custom ID for both addresses in the “Pickup” and “Dropoff” columns. Thus, the Enterprise Architect will recognize that both addresses with the same ID are a pickup and drop-off address pair and since the ID of the “20 W 34th St” address is placed in the “Pickup” column and the same ID of the “405 Lexington Ave” address is placed in the “Dropoff” column, the “20 W 34th St” address will be visited first for a pickup and the “405 Lexington Ave” address will be visited second for a drop-off.  NOTE: The order of addresses in the spreadsheet does not affect the optimization. To make your pickup and drop-off addresses easier to track and manage, use custom aliases. For example, you can define the “Pickup” and “Dropoff” aliases for each address pair in the spreadsheet and suffix both aliases of each address pair with its unique ID.

Once the spreadsheet is imported, all columns with their corresponding data are automatically uploaded to the “Addresses” tab. To geocode the imported addresses, click on the “Geocode” button respectively.

After that, select the column that contains the addresses that you want to geocode and then transfer it from the left-side list to the right-side list by clicking on the corresponding button. If you want to automatically upload all geocoded addresses to your Route4Me Synchronized Address Book, check the corresponding box and then click on the “Start” button to initiate geocoding.

Once the addresses are geocoded, the app assigns unique latitude and longitude coordinates to each geocoded address, as well as automatically corrects and completes all geocoded address (“fixed_address” column). Next, to use the geocoded addresses for planning one or multiple routes, click on the “Optimize” button.

After that, in the “General” tab, input the name for the routes into the corresponding field and then adjust the routes’ schedule accordingly. In the “Service Time per Stop” field, you can define the preferred service time that will be applied to each stop/address on the planned routes (learn more).

Next, use the corresponding field to add the address of the routes’ depot/starting point and then click on the “Geocode” button to geocode the added address. If you want all planned routes to start from the same depot, check the “Default Depot” box accordingly.

After that, to enable the pickup and drop-off route planning, select the Multiple Drivers Route optimization by checking the corresponding box in the “Optimization” tab and then adjust the optimization’s constraints accordingly (learn more).

In the “Pickup and Dropoff” tab, you can view each address pair and check which address in each pair will be visited first for a pickup and which one will be visited second for a drop-off.

In the “User and Vehicle” tab, you can assign a team member (learn more) and a vehicle to each planned route. To finish and plan the routes, click on the “Start” button accordingly.

Once the routes are planned, they are added to the Routes List where you can manage them accordingly (learn more). To view a particular route on the map in the Enterprise Architect, click on the corresponding icon next to this route. NOTE: Even when you select the Multiple Drivers Route optimization, the Enterprise Architect can plan only a single route if this is the most efficient option.

In the stops list of the opened route, you can see that the visitation of addresses in each pickup and drop-off address pair (marked with the predefined custom aliases) are sequenced in such a way that in each address pair, the pickup address must be visited first and the drop-off address must be visited second.

Thus, even though several pickup or drop-off addresses can come in a row, all addresses will always be sequenced in such a way that in each address pair, the pickup address will always be visited first and the drop-off address will always be visited second.

Route4Me’s Enterprise Architect supports near real-time data synchronization with your Route4Me account. Thus, when you plan a new route using the Enterprise Architect, this route is instantly synchronized with your Route4Me account and becomes available in your Routes List on the Route4Me Web Platform.

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