Tour Planning in Road Freight: Meaning and Key Factors

Tour planning is the process of grouping transport orders into tours and putting the stops in the best sequence, usually for a single driver or vehicle. It is what turns a list of orders into an efficient working day on the road. In road freight the meaning goes beyond finding a short way: a tour plan also has to respect time windows, the capacity of the vehicle and the driver's hours.

Tour planning vs route planning

Route planning finds the best path between stops. Tour planning goes further: it decides which orders belong on which tour, in what order the stops are served, and which vehicle runs them, taking account of capacity, driver hours and vehicle restrictions such as height or weight. A good route inside a badly built tour still wastes kilometres.

Key factors in a tour

• Orders and their time windows at each loading and unloading point
• Vehicle capacity: loading metres, pallet places and payload
• Drivers' hours: under Regulation (EC) No 561/2006, a break of at least 45 minutes after no more than 4.5 hours of driving, and normally no more than 9 hours of driving a day, extendable to 10 hours twice a week
• Vehicle restrictions and national driving bans on Sundays and public holidays
• Tolls and the cost of each kilometre

These factors pull against each other. The shortest sequence may miss a delivery slot, and the cheapest tour on paper may run out of driving time before the last stop.

Static and dynamic tour planning

In static tour planning the same tours repeat on a fixed schedule, as in a milk run that collects from the same suppliers every day. Dynamic tour planning rebuilds the tours from the orders that come in for the next day or even during the day. Most carriers mix both: a fixed backbone of regular customers, filled up with spot orders.

Either way the plan rarely survives the day unchanged. A cancelled load, a truck in the workshop or a long wait at a ramp means re-planning the remaining stops, which is why dispatchers plan tours in software rather than on paper. The tour optimisation software from IMPARGO bundles orders into tours for several trucks at once.

Common mistakes in tour planning

Typical errors are stop times that ignore waiting at the ramp, tours that forget a weekend driving ban, and sequences planned by distance alone when a slightly longer road costs less in tolls. Another is leaving out the way back: a tour that ends far from the next load adds empty miles that nobody pays for.