[jeddawson]

Have you used any that are actually effective? Please share if so :)

I work within the trash collection industry and we've tried several different optimization schemes that in general don't come close to optimal efficiency. The marketing for a lot of the optimization companies would lead you to believe that they're able to unlock a lot more efficiency than they actually deliver. Our clients that have applied algorithms to optimize their routes quickly reverted to human optimization since the algorithms fail to provide any benefit and typically require tremendous effort to get started.

I would love to discover an algorithm that is able to consistently provide actually optimized collection routes without hand holding!