1. Gather the address and shift data
The entire plan rests on this data, and most plans break right here. A missing house number, an outdated address or a wrong shift record quietly feeds every later step with the wrong input.
When converting addresses to coordinates, review the result. In newly built areas in particular, address matching can be off by a few hundred metres; that offset shifts the stop and needlessly moves someone onto a different vehicle.
- Employee name, address and assigned shift
- Shift start and end times
- Vehicle list and the capacity of each
- Any routes that must stay fixed
2. Place stops rather than collecting at the door
Door-to-door collection is not viable in employee transport; vehicle count and ride time quickly get out of hand. Instead, people living close together gather at a shared stop.
The one critical parameter here is the walking-distance limit. Widening it reduces the number of stops, shortens the ride and saves vehicles — but past a point people simply stop using the service. Narrowing it does the reverse. The right value varies by employer, and by area too, because 300 metres uphill is not 300 metres on the flat.
3. Assign vehicles and derive the stop order
Which stops go on the same vehicle, and in what order that vehicle visits them, are two nested questions. A hand-built plan usually forms the groups by intuition first and then finds an order by trial. That works at small scale; as the vehicle count grows it drifts away from a good solution, because the grouping decision was made independently of the ordering.
The classic textbook routing formulations also split these two questions by simplifying them: a single vehicle, fixed capacity, an unchanging road network and known, constant travel times. In a real shuttle operation none of those are constant.
4. Verify backwards from the shift time
Once the route exists, every vehicle has to reach the final stop before the shift starts. Verification runs backwards: start from the arrival time and subtract dwell times and travel times to find when the first passenger must be collected.
The travel times used must belong to that hour. Traffic at 07:30 is not traffic at 10:00; a plan built on averages works on paper and runs late in the field.
These four steps can be carried out by hand, but because each step's decision changes the others, a hand-built plan breaks at the first change. In an operation where the passenger list changes weekly, the plan has to be rebuildable at the same pace.