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.
This feature is available for accounts with either Google Maps or Here Maps as their Map provider.
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