Real-Time Tracking Without the Battery Tax
Most fleet apps drain a driver's phone in three hours. We rebuilt our location pipeline so drivers finish a 10-hour shift with battery to spare.
A look at the solver rewrite that made same-day re-dispatch viable for our largest customers.
The first version of our optimizer used a clean academic VRP solver. It worked. It also took 90 seconds on a 200-stop fleet. That is fine for overnight batch dispatch — and useless for the same-day re-dispatch our larger customers needed.
What changed
- Warm-start from yesterday's solution — same fleet, similar geography, 70% structure carries over
- Parallelized cluster step across vCPUs (was single-threaded)
- Cheaper distance proxy for the first 50ms; OSRM real distance only on top candidates
- Aggressive early-termination on stable solutions
P50 dispatch time is now 4.8s. P95 is 11s. We have not had a customer ask for a faster solver since the rewrite. (We are still going to make it faster.)