The effect of adding stops to a delivery route

In a world where shipping is guaranteed in record times, it has never been more important for businesses to perfect their distribution methods. Whether the enterprise is food, merchandise, or service delivery, it is critical that one understands the fundamentals of on-demand delivery planning. The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to map the expected total distance in a delivery route as a function of the number of nodes, or stops, along the route. We consider both the case where the node orders are prioritized in a first come first served basis and are therefore considered fair, as well as the case where the order of the nodes is optimized to decrease the total distance. The results are benchmarked using delivery locations in three cities in the United States.