RoutingPlan

RoutingPlan is a formal artifact that specifies a sequence of routes and actions intended to move assets, data, or requests from origins to destinations through a network or transportation system. It acts as a blueprint for execution systems such as navigation apps, logistics schedulers, or software-defined network controllers, and can serve as an auditable basis for operational decisions.

A RoutingPlan typically includes fields such as origin and one or more destinations, an ordered set of legs or waypoints, distances, estimated travel times, costs, and the modes of transport or data paths involved. It may also capture timing constraints, resource or vehicle assignments, priority levels, and contingency notes or fallback routes. Metadata such as validity windows, penalties, and reliability scores may be attached to support evaluation and re-planning.

Plan generation relies on routing and optimization engines that solve problems ranging from shortest-path and time-dependent routing to vehicle routing with capacity and time-window constraints. Algorithms generate candidate routes and evaluate them against objectives like minimizing total distance, time, or expense while honoring constraints, preferences, and real-world conditions. In dynamic environments, RoutingPlans can be re-optimized in response to events such as traffic changes, outages, or new demands.

Applications span road and multimodal logistics, fleet optimization, real-time navigation, data network traffic engineering, and programmable network routing. Limitations include the quality of input data, computational complexity for large networks, and the need for timely re-planning to accommodate changes.