Feature Request: Minimum Vehicle Utilization / Minimum Assigned Jobs per Route

[AymanElarian]

Feature Request: Minimum Vehicle Utilization / Minimum Assigned Jobs per Route

Hello VROOM team,

We are using VROOM for school transportation planning, where each student represents a pickup and delivery task (pickup from home and delivery to school).

One requirement we frequently face is defining a minimum vehicle utilization threshold before activating a route.

For example:

• Vehicle capacity: 50 seats
• Minimum utilization target: 50%
• Minimum required assigned jobs before route activation: 25 jobs

Currently, VROOM supports maximum capacity constraints, but we could not find support for minimum route utilization or minimum assigned jobs per vehicle.

Would it be possible to support something like:

{
  "min_utilization": 0.5
}

or:

{
  "min_jobs": 25
}

at the vehicle level?

This would be very useful for:

• School transportation
• Shuttle operations
• Workforce transportation
• Public transport planning

The goal is to avoid generating underutilized routes unless operationally necessary.

Ideally, this could work either:

• as a hard constraint
• or as a soft optimization penalty/preference

Thank you.

[jcoupey]

There is some discussion background that is still relevant on this in #612, see especially #612 (comment).

The goal is to avoid generating underutilized routes unless operationally necessary.

Sounds like something you could achieve indirectly by using prohibitively high vehicle fixed costs: then loading existing vehicles will always be considered better than adding underutilized vehicles for the sake of other "small" travel gains.