A Real Fleet as the Starting Point
Route optimization sounds the same in every brochure. It only becomes interesting with real numbers. These come from the analysis of a municipal fleet in northern Germany: 39,281 containers, spread across 6 specialized fleets, served in a system of 60 weekly slots. On paper, a balanced plan, grown over years, as in almost every operation. The weekly totals per fleet were indeed close together. And yet this plan contained an imbalance that is invisible from the outside.
The Imbalance Lives in the Day, Not the Week
The single most loaded slot carried 47.1 hours of workload; the lightest, 9.0 hours. Between them lies a spread of 38.1 hours, inside the same fleet structure, in the same week. That is the core finding, and it is typical: weekly totals look healthy while individual days push vehicles and drivers to the edge and other days give capacity away. If you only manage weekly utilization, you are optimizing the wrong level. The real action is in the daily distribution.
97.6 Percent: What Reassignment Potential Means
The analysis found that 97.6 percent of container groups would benefit from a different slot assignment, while respecting the operational 2+2 rule that limits how far assignments may be shifted. Important context: this is an analysis result about potential, not a measured outcome figure. But it shows how large the optimization surface can be in a grown plan, even one built with real craft. Almost every container group sat in a historically justified but no longer optimal place.
Fill Level as a Dial, Not an Assumption
The second insight: containers are not full just because they get collected. The analysis works with seasonal fill-level parameters, 60 percent during summer holidays, 75 percent in spring and autumn, deliberately adjustable so real experience values can flow in. Volume times fill level times 0.4 kilograms per liter yields the expected weight per container, from that the moment the truck is full, from that the number and placement of disposal trips to the real facilities. Exactly this chain of calculation is the difference between a map with pins and optimization that understands daily operations. (As of: analysis May 2026)