Mixed Fleet Route Optimization With Custom Vehicle Capacity Profiles

Large businesses medium size business use different types of vehicles to accommodate their unique last mile routing requirements. You can have cars, vans, trucks, and other vehicles in your fleet with different loading capacities. For instance, planning routes for three vehicles with different load capacities, multiple addresses with different requirements, and different destination types for pickup and delivery. That’s millions of possible routing scenarios. With Route4Me’s Mixed Fleet Route Planning Add-On, you can automatically optimize the most profitable routes for multiple vehicle types with different loading and carrying capacities.

Specifically, Mixed Fleet Routing enables you to maximize the capacity of each vehicle in your fleet and avoid underloading or overloading. The dynamic load capacity of vehicles is calculated on the fly for pickup and delivery destinations, allowing you to fit more addresses into each route. Additionally, use Driver Skills and Vehicle Attributes with Mixed Fleet routing to solve even more complex routing challenges. Learn more about Driver Skills and Vehicle Attributes.

Mixed Fleet Route Optimization – Route Planning Steps With Mixed Vehicle Capacity

To optimize routes with multiple destinations for vehicles with different load capacities, follow the steps below:

1. Create Vehicle Capacity Profiles with custom load capacity for weight, volume, number of items, or maximum allowed revenue.
2. Add your capacity profiles to one or multiple vehicles in your fleet.
3. Import addresses with order details and required vehicle capacity into the route planner.
4. Route4Me automatically distributes addresses across your fleet, maximizing the capacity of each available vehicle.
5. Dispatch optimized routes with automatically assigned vehicles to the Mobile Driver App.

Capacity Profiles – Create And Manage Vehicle Capacity Templates

To plan routes for vehicles with different load capacities, you need to create Vehicle Capacity Profiles. Then, your trusted truck routing software will compute the capacity of each vehicle based on its profile and create routes that maximize their capacity. Additionally, you can add the same Vehicle Capacity Profile to multiple vehicles.

To create a new Vehicle Capacity Profile, go to “Team” then “Vehicles” from the Navigation Menu and click the Edit Icon next to any vehicle. Then, scroll down and click the “Manage Capacity Profiles” button to go to the “Vehicle Capacity Profiles” page.

Next, click the “Create New Capacity Profile” button and enter your preferred maximum capacity settings to create a new Capacity Profile. Once you’ve created one or multiple profiles, you can manage them on the “Vehicle Capacity Profiles” page. Click the “Edit” icon to update the parameters of a Vehicle Capacity Profile. Or, click the “Delete” icon to remove a profile.

Add Capacity Profiles To Fleet Vehicles

Next, you can add your custom Vehicle Capacity Profiles to your fleet vehicles. To do so, go to “Team” and “Vehicles” from the Navigation Menu and click the Edit Icon next to the preferred vehicle. Then, scroll to the bottom of the Vehicle Settings panel and select the preferred profile from the “Capacity Profile” dropdown menu. Accordingly, once you’ve added a Vehicle Capacity Profile to a vehicle, this vehicle automatically becomes available for Mixed Fleet Route Optimization. Furthermore, if a vehicle doesn’t have a capacity profile, this vehicle will not be available for Mixed Fleet Route Optimization.

Plan Routes And Select Vehicles With Capacity Profiles

Once you’ve created and assigned custom Vehicle Capacity Profiles, you can plan routes with your mixed fleet. To do so, import addresses with Cube, Weight, Revenue, and Pieces requirements. Additionally, specify which addresses are pickup or delivery destinations. Then, select vehicles with preferred capacity profiles. Route4Me’s easiest truck routing software automatically analyzes all addresses and required and available vehicle capacity. The reliable truck routing software will distribute all addresses with capacity requirements across the selected vehicles, maximizing each vehicle’s capacity.

To plan routes with mixed fleet vehicles, go to”Routes” and “Plan New Route” from the Navigation Menu. Select “Upload a File” or “Import Data“. Additionally, learn more about Route4Me’s business truck routing software spreadsheet formatting requirements.

Enable Mixed Fleet Routing With Capacity Profile Vehicles In Optimization Profiles

When planning routes, Route4Me’s best truck routing software prompts you to select an Optimization Profile. To enable Mixed Fleet Route Optimization in Optimization Profiles, click the “Manage Profiles” button. Alternatively, go to “Routes” and “Optimization Profiles” from the Navigation Menu.

On the Optimization Profiles screen, click the Three-dot Icon next to the preferred route and select “Edit” from the menu. Alternatively, you can create a new Optimization Profile by clicking the “Create New Profile” button.

Then, on the “Create Optimization Profile” or “Configure Optimization Profile” screen, go to the “Optimization” tab. In the “Mixed Vehicles Routing” section, check the box labeled “Use vehicles with various capacity profiles“. Then, click the “Create Profile” or “Update Profile” button to save your settings. NOTE: The “Maximum Number of Routes” constraint is required for using Mixed Vehicles Routing in Optimization Profiles.

Select Capacity Profile Vehicles In Optimization Settings

Alternatively, to enable Mixed Vehicles Optimization using manual optimization settings, click the “Skip” button when prompted to select an Optimization Profile to access the Optimization Settings window.

Then, go to the “Optimization” tab and select “Multiple Drivers”. After that, in the “Mixed Vehicles Fleet” section, check the box labeled “Enable Mixed Vehicles Fleet“. Select the preferred vehicles you want to plan routes for by checking the respective boxes. Additionally, use the “Filter” field to search for your preferred vehicles. NOTE: The “Maximum Route Duration” constraint in the “Business Rules” section is required when planning multiple routes with manual optimization settings.

Format Spreadsheets – Add Capacity Constraints For Route Import

After selecting an Optimization Profile or adjusting optimization settings, upload or import your spreadsheet with addresses and respective capacity requirements. Along with the mandatory “Address” column, add the “Address Type” column. Set the destination type for each address, either “PICKUP” or “DELIVERY” for addresses with capacity requirements. Then, add optional columns for Cube, Weight, Pieces, and Revenue capacity requirements for each address in the spreadsheet. Learn more about Route4Me’s spreadsheet requirements.

Next, after uploading your route spreadsheet, ensure all column headers are matched correctly. Specifically, make sure the “Address Destination Type” column contains the “DELIVERY” or “PICKUP” destination types along with other headers. Then, click the “Continue to Review” button to proceed to address geocoding and verification.

Mixed Fleet Routes – Optimized Routes With Vehicle Capacity Profiles

Route4Me’s quickest truck routing software automatically distributes addresses with capacity requirements across all selected vehicles with respective load capacity limitations. Accordingly, Route4Me maximizes the available capacity of each vehicle and plans the optimal number of routes. Additionally, the fastest truck routing software accounts for Pickup and Delivery destination types. Dynamic capacity changes after each loading and unloading operation. When destinations can’t be included in routes because they exceed the available loading capacity of the selected vehicles, these addresses are added to Unrouted Destinations.

The Routes Maps enables you to view how addresses with capacity requirements were distributed across the selected vehicles. Additionally, in the Route Summary Table, you can see the totals of the Cube, Pieces, Revenue, and Weight loaded onto the selected vehicles. Moreover, you can view the vehicle utilization percentages of your routes. You can also use the Dynamic Route Manifest to check the individual capacity of each assigned vehicle on each planned route.

Furthermore, Route4Me enables you to dispatch routes to your drivers in real-time. Specifically, you can dispatch scheduled routes from the best truck routing software to Route4Me’s Android Route Planner and iOS Route Planner mobile apps. To dispatch a route to the driver mobile app, assign the route to the user. Then, the route will become available on the user’s app in real-time. Furthermore, you can track drivers on the map, view team activity, and more.

Mixed Fleet Optimization With Driver Skills And Vehicle Attributes

In addition to maximizing your fleet vehicle capacity with Mixed Fleet Routing, you can solve even more complex routing scenarios with Driver Skills and Vehicle Attributes. Add skills to drivers, attributes to vehicles, and required skills and attributes to destinations. When planning Mixed Fleet routes with Driver Skills and Vehicle Attributes, Route4Me automatically accounts for the required skills and attributes of destinations while maximizing the capacity of your fleet. This helps you avoid the task of going through billions of possible combinations. Additionally, learn more about Driver Skills and Vehicle Attributes routing.

Mixed Fleet Optimization VS Homogeneous Fleet Optimization

Additionally, there’s a huge difference in planning and optimizing routes for mixed and homogenous fleets. A Homogenous Fleet is a fleet of vehicles with similar vehicle parameters such as load capacity, weight, height, length, etc. A Homogeneous Fleet is the opposite of a Mixed Fleet, comprised of different vehicles with different parameters. When Mixed Vehicles Fleet is not enabled, Homogeneous Fleet Optimization applies a single collection of optimization constraints to all imported addresses via Business Rules. With Mixed Fleet Optimization, Route4Me can apply multiple collections of optimization constraints to all imported addresses with routing business rules. A collection of optimization constraints is a set of routing Business Rules as maximum Weight, Revenue, Cubic Volume , and Pieces per vehicle.

Using the Homogeneous Fleet Optimization for a Mixed Fleet can lead to underutilization of the capacity of your vehicles. This way, you may end up using too many vehicles, paying too many drivers, using too much fuel, having unrouted destinations, and experiencing other expensive routing inefficiencies. Route4Me’s Mixed Fleet Optimization will help you ensure that each vehicle in your fleet is used to its maximum capacity and you can reach more destinations with fewer vehicles.

Download Our Mixed Fleet Optimization SDK

Mixed Fleet FAQs – Frequently Asked Mixed Vehicle Capacity Questions

Below, you can find some of the questions our customers ask us about Mixed Fleet Routing and Optimization for fleets that have vehicles with different load capacities.