Weighted Route Planning for Time-Critical Delivery Stops

The patent transforms the route planning problem from minimizing only route length to minimizing a composite score that incorporates both distance and time parameters. The scoring mechanism assigns different weights to different route segments based on their importance, effectively changing the optimization parameter from pure geometric distance to a weighted combination of distance and time, where S = Σ(wi × di) and wi represents the weight (importance) of each route point and di represents the distance to that point.

The patent applies local quality by assigning different importance weights to different route points based on their specific characteristics. Instead of treating all locations equally, the system identifies key locations (such as important customers or time-sensitive deliveries) and assigns them higher weights in the scoring function. This allows the route planning to optimize differently for different segments of the route, prioritizing visits to high-importance locations while still maintaining overall route efficiency.

The patent implements a hybrid approach that combines genetic algorithm iterations with a scoring mechanism. Instead of relying solely on extensive genetic algorithm iterations to find the optimal route, the system uses the scoring mechanism (S = Σ(wi × di)) to guide the selection and evaluation of routes during the genetic algorithm process. This allows the system to achieve good optimization results with fewer iterations by using the score as a fitness function that directly reflects the optimization goal, thereby reducing computational complexity while maintaining route optimization quality.