Route planners with multiple destinations

plumb1_2

hi I have to travel tomorrow morning about 50 miles away

I am collecting items I have 3 destinations to pick up from, is the a route planner available that I can put my postcode in then the other 3, and it will work out the best route, time and mileage wise.

You don’t want to double back on myself.

Ayr_Rage

Google Maps, go to DIRECTIONS and add your stops in order.

daveyjp

fastestroute.co.uk enter the postcodes and it will do the calcs for you

Woodstok2000

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82117140#Comment_82117140

I think Google maps only calculates the route in the order you specify. There are tools (like the one @daveyjp suggested) where you put all your stops in, and it then calculates the optimal order to visit them in and provides directions.

paul_c123

PostTag can optimise stops and is free.

Ectophile

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82117145#Comment_82117145

I'm quite impressed that they allow up to 100 stops.

This is the classic Travelling Salesman Problem. It's a notorious mathematical problem in that the complexity of the calculation increases very rapidly as you increase the number of stops. Add too many and no computer in existence can solve it.

forgotmyname

The computer can put them into order of shortest distance or shortest time if it knows the speed of each road, without traffic
data it could be an inefficient route though.

I had the choice of 2 locations the other day, one was 8.6 miles and google maps estimated 28 to 44 minutes leaving at 10am.
the other location was 17 miles and it estimated 24 to 32 minutes again leaving at 10am.

Doing a loop of the 3 locations would have been better to do the 17 mile journey first and then up to the location that was
9 miles away because the route comes in from a quieter route rather than heating closer to the City.

The vehicle will also affect which is the best route if you need to arrive from a certain direction. You could add thousands of
locations and the computer will do it but it will take some time. We used route planning software for the delivery vehicles and
as a test I added many all over the country. It just took a long time to calculate and that was an AMD 4200 Dual Core CPU
with 8GB of RAM.

Modern CPU's could probably do that in a couple of minutes if it was time or distance alone but it did not have the ability to
change the order depending on which side of the road you approached the stop or traffic data.

Maybe try AI? Not sure if a free one would be able to do that though? You could feed it information on which direction to
approach or where to find parking or maybe you know a junction that gets bottlenecked so faster to take an alternative
route.

Woodstok2000

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82117238#Comment_82117238

I think it's even harder than the Travelling Salesman problem as that specifies visiting each destination once, whereas here you can also double back or loop through a destination multiple times.

For 100 cities there are about 4.5x10^53 permutations, smwhich explains why it might take a while.

Mildly_Miffed

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82117190#Comment_82117190

Yes, goomaps only does the order you put them in, but it's trivially easy to rearrange them - and there's not THAT many possible combinations with three destination…

Basic common sense will also give a likely best route at a glance, too, from a quick glance at the relative positions on a map, especially if you have a definite destination. A little common sense on intermediates will refine the routes down further, too.

Woodstok2000

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82117729#Comment_82117729

6 combinations - not too many for Google maps but still quicker to use a tool designed for the job.