What order should you drive your stops in?
You have eight places to be this week and no strong opinion about the order, so you drive them the way you wrote them down. That list runs 1,525 miles. The same eight stops, resequenced, run 1,095.
Operations Intermediate Optimization free
After you install, this is the model to open.
Shortest Route Finder
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
Hit Solve and the scrambled list snaps into a circuit anyone would recognize as sensible: Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, home.
- Best loop the optimizer finds
- 1,095 miles
- Same stops, order as typed
- 1,525 miles
- Cut from one swing
- 430 miles, 28% shorter
- Fuel and wear saved
- $310 per swing at $0.72/mi
Driven in the order the stops were written down, the loop covers 1,525 miles. Resequenced, it covers 1,095 miles, which takes 430 miles and about 7.8 hours of driving out of a single swing, roughly $310 at 72 cents a mile. Run that loop twice a month and it is about 10,300 miles and $7,400 a year, for stops you were already going to make.
The model
The sheet holds one row per stop with its position on a simple east/north mile grid, plus a road factor that turns straight-line distance into driving miles. The optimizer changes only the priority column, and the visit order, every leg length and the total fall out of it.
| Stops in the loop | 8 (home base plus 7 accounts) |
| Where each stop sits | East/north miles on a flat grid |
| Road factor | 1.2 x straight-line distance |
| Cost per mile | $0.72 (fuel, wear, maintenance) |
| Average speed | 55 mph |
| Starting order | As typed, alphabetical (1,525 miles) |
| Possible orderings | 5,040 |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
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