Route optimization

Cooriroo works out the driving order for a trip’s stops and stores the answer as a route plan: one line to draw on the map, one distance and duration figure, and an estimated arrival time for every stop. Some of that happens when you ask for it, and a lot of it happens on its own. This page covers both, and how to read the result.

A trip has at most one route plan. Recalculating replaces it rather than adding a version, so what you read is always the current answer. Each plan carries:

• The path — an encoded line. This is what the live map draws for the trip.
• Distance and duration — for the whole trip and per leg, plus a duration without traffic when the provider returns one.
• The waypoint order — which stop the optimizer put where.
• Confidence and timing — high, medium or low, with the moment the plan was calculated and the moment it goes stale.

The pattern is deliberate. Where the stop order has genuinely changed, the old plan is deleted immediately and the map shows no line for a few seconds rather than a confidently wrong one. Where the trip is merely starting, nothing is deleted — a perfectly good plan is left in place.

A stop can carry an opening and a closing time. By default those windows are advisory: your order is kept and each stop is marked as arriving within its window or outside it, so a violation is visible without anything being moved behind your back.

Turn on the enforce time windows route-optimization setting and windows become a hard constraint instead. Route calculation reorders the trip’s active stops into a window-feasible sequence — earliest deadline first, still honouring locked stops — and saves that order. Where the shortest route would miss a window, the preview can offer a third, window-respecting option alongside current and optimized.

Arrival times account for the time spent at each stop, not just the driving. A stop’s own planned service duration wins where it has one; otherwise Cooriroo uses the base dwell time plus a per-item amount from your route-optimization settings.

A route plan expires thirty minutes after it is calculated. Reading it after that returns it with low confidence rather than pretending traffic from half an hour ago still applies. The path is not deleted, so the map keeps drawing the trip.

Separately, a reported position can be compared with the stored path to detect a driver going their own way. The default threshold is 500 metres, and the severity depends on how far off the line they are: