PRODUCT

# One API Call to Route a Mixed Fleet: Our Multi-Modal VRP Is Now Open

[Transportial Team](https://transportial.com/en/about) · Editorial · November 9, 2026

![One API Call to Route a Mixed Fleet: Our Multi-Modal VRP Is Now Open](/assets/blog/route-optimization-horizontal-blog-image.jpg)

Most vehicle routing APIs assume every vehicle is a truck. Plenty of freight doesn't work that way: a planner in Rotterdam can have trucks, a barge and a rail slot in the same day's work, and each moves at a different speed, reaches different places and is limited by different things.

Our solver has handled that inside Transportial for a while. It is now available on its own, as `POST /vrp/solve`. You send the whole problem in one request and get the tours back. You don't need any orders, vehicles or locations in Transportial, and the call stores nothing.

## What you send

Three lists and some options: **locations**, **vehicles** and **shipments**. A shipment is a pickup and a delivery that the same vehicle must serve, in that order. This is a truck and a barge leaving the same port:

```
{
  "locations": [
    { "id": "rotterdam", "lat": 51.9244, "lon": 4.4777, "transportModes": ["inlandWaterway"] },
    { "id": "duisburg", "lat": 51.4344, "lon": 6.7623, "transportModes": ["inlandWaterway"] },
    { "id": "utrecht", "lat": 52.0907, "lon": 5.1214, "transportModes": [] }
  ],
  "vehicles": [
    { "id": "truck-1", "startLocationId": "rotterdam", "capacity": { "weightKg": 24000 } },
    { "id": "barge-1", "startLocationId": "rotterdam", "transportMode": "inlandWaterway", "capacity": { "weightKg": 2000000 } }
  ],
  "shipments": [
    { "id": "pallets", "pickup": { "locationId": "rotterdam" }, "delivery": { "locationId": "utrecht" }, "load": { "weightKg": 8000 } },
    { "id": "steel", "pickup": { "locationId": "rotterdam" }, "delivery": { "locationId": "duisburg" }, "load": { "weightKg": 900000 } }
  ]
}
```

The steel is far too heavy for the truck. Utrecht has an empty `transportModes` list, so only road reaches it. The solver sends each shipment to the only vehicle that can take it, and with more shipments it decides who carries what and in which order.

## What makes it multi-modal

Each vehicle has one mode and drives one tour, and three things change with that mode.

### Travel times

Every mode has its own travel data. You can send a matrix per mode, from your own routing engine or sailing schedules. A mode without one is estimated from the straight-line distance with a detour factor and average speed: 13 km/h and a 1.3 detour for a barge by default, against 80 km/h and a 1.3 detour for a truck. Estimates are never silent, because the response names them in `warnings`.

### Where a vehicle can go

A location can list the non-road modes that reach it, which is how a quay or rail terminal differs from a warehouse. A barge only gets shipments between places on the water. Road reaches everywhere.

### What fills up first

A truck can run out of weight, loading meters or volume. Water and rail are checked on weight, and air on chargeable weight and volume.

## How it searches

The default search starts with a nearest-neighbor plan, then improves it with moves between tours (relocating, swapping, merging and splitting) and 2-opt within a tour. The alternative, `large_neighborhood_search`, repeatedly tears out part of the plan and rebuilds it with greedy and regret insertion, using simulated-annealing acceptance so it can escape a local optimum. It also retries shipments the first plan could not place.

Both respect time windows, waiting at a stop when the vehicle arrives early, and both stop when your time budget runs out, up to ten seconds. Shipments that didn't make it are returned with a reason, so nothing disappears quietly.

## What it doesn't do

A shipment stays on one vehicle on this endpoint. If your freight goes truck to train to truck with a transfer at a terminal, that is a different problem, and `POST /routeOptions` plans those chains from saved consignments and scheduled departures. Driver-hour rules aren't applied here either, since they depend on platform settings and this endpoint only looks at your request.

And an estimate is an estimate: without your own matrices, the distances are good enough to compare plans, not to promise an arrival time.

## Try it

The [vehicle routing page](/en/developers/algorithms/vehicle-routing) has the full example with its real response. It sits alongside the rest of what you can call the same way, including [3D load planning](/en/developers/algorithms/load-planning). For a step-by-step version, see the [guide in our documentation](https://docs.transportial.com/examples/multimodal-vrp).

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