Sometimes you may need to plan a trip where a vehicle must visit a series of locations (e.g., customers) but in which the order by which the visits are made is not relevant: the important thing to do is to minimize the total mileage, reordering the points at will. This is commonly called the TSP (Traveling Salesman Problem).
For instance, see this scenario:
The list of points is shown on the left panel:
Click now on the Options button above the list of addresses:
The following board opens, and it is possible to see that the Allow waypoints reordering option is unchecked:
Now, by clicking on the button Calculate below the list of points:
The path will be calculated keeping the order by which the points have been placed by you:
In this example, the total mileage is 2337.9 [km].
Now, by ticking option Allow waypoint reordering:
And clicking again in the Calculate button, as previously shown, the outcome will be a new optimized path where the waypoints have been reordered:
You can see that the newly generated path has a total mileage of 1406.9 [km], which is considerably less than the non-optimized path.
Take also into consideration that the start and end points were not changed and were respected during the optimization step.
NOTE: The limit of waypoints to reorder a route is 23 waypoints (both Google and Here Maps) if you set more than 23 waypoints you will see the following warning and no reorder is executed:
This feature is available for accounts with either Google Maps or Here Maps as their Map provider.
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