Walmart's most thoroughly documented routing system is Load Planner, which plans multi-stop truck routes and trailer loads between its distribution centers and stores. In a peer-reviewed 2024 paper, Walmart reported that the system eliminated 108,000 truck routes covering 33 million miles (about 53 million kilometers) in fiscal year 2023. Delivery to homes, including drone delivery with Wing, is a separate effort and is not what that paper describes.
Key takeaways
- Load Planner handles store replenishment by truck. It is a middle-mile system, not a last-mile router for customer orders.
- Walmart's paper credits it with 108,000 fewer truck routes, 33 million fewer miles, USD 91.5 million in savings, and 98.6 million fewer pounds of CO2 in fiscal year 2023. These are company-reported figures.
- The routing module uses tabu search with exchange, two-opt, and large neighborhood moves, and it must satisfy more than 50 business rules.
- Walmart's own announcements quote slightly different totals than its paper, so any single figure should be cited with its source.
- Drone delivery with Wing is expanding toward more than 270 locations in 2027, according to Wing.
What Load Planner does
The paper, published in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics in 2024, describes the scale of the network: 117 distribution centers, 26 fulfillment centers, around 600 Sam's Club locations, and more than 4,700 stores in the United States. Load Planner sits inside a larger decision framework that also covers network design and simulation. Its job is to decide how products move once facilities and capacities are fixed: which pallets share a truck, in what order stores are visited, and how pallets are arranged in the trailer.
Eight optimization modules work together. The routing module builds multi-stop routes that deliver pallets inside each store's receiving window. Other modules check, within milliseconds, whether a route sequence respects federal hours-of-service rules and whether the pallets can physically be loaded in delivery order. That fast feasibility checking is what lets the search try a very large number of alternatives. The wider program, covering strategy through execution, earned Walmart the 2023 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award.
How the routing problem is solved
This is a vehicle routing problem, the multi-truck generalization of the traveling salesman problem. It was formulated by Dantzig and Ramser in 1959. The paper states that conventional methods were inadequate for Walmart's settings, because a solution has to respect over 50 distinct rules covering time windows, weight and volume, safety, operations, and equipment at specific sites.
The authors describe a metaheuristic framework that combines neighborhood searches, heuristics, and mixed-integer programming models. Initial routes are built either as a routing problem or by assigning pallets to route templates. A customized tabu search then improves them with moves such as one-zero exchange (which reduces the number of routes), one-one exchange, two-opt (which untangles crossing paths), and large neighborhood search. The paper says these problems are NP-hard, so the methods aim for strong solutions in practical time, not proven optima.
A toy example of why greedy routing falls short
The table below is an illustrative example with invented road distances in miles for one truck leaving a depot and visiting four stores. It is not Walmart data.
| Method (illustrative example) | Stop order | Total miles |
|---|---|---|
| Nearest next stop each time | Depot, E, C, A, B, Depot | 79 |
| Best of all 24 orders | Depot, A, B, C, E, Depot | 69 |
With the made-up distances Depot to E 9, E to C 7, C to A 24, A to B 16, and B to Depot 23, the nearest-stop rule starts well and then pays for it with a long final leg. The better plan uses legs of 12, 16, 25, 7, and 9 miles. Four stores allow only 24 orders, so checking all of them is easy. Real networks have thousands of stores and dozens of rules, which is why local search improves a first plan step by step instead of enumerating.
Walmart's reported numbers and why they differ
Two sets of totals appear in Walmart-related material. The paper's abstract reports 108,000 truck routes eliminated, 33 million miles, 98.6 million pounds of CO2, and USD 91.5 million in fiscal year 2023. On March 14, 2024, Walmart Commerce Technologies announced that Route Optimization would be sold to outside businesses as software as a service. Trade coverage of that announcement quoted 30 million unnecessary miles, 94 million pounds of CO2, and 110,000 inefficient paths.
| Source | Miles avoided | CO2 avoided | Routes or paths |
|---|---|---|---|
| INFORMS journal paper, 2024 | 33 million | 98.6 million pounds | 108,000 routes |
| March 2024 launch coverage | 30 million | 94 million pounds | 110,000 paths |
The sources do not explain the gap, which may come from different measurement periods or definitions. No independent audit of either set was found, so both are best treated as Walmart's own reporting.
Where drone delivery fits
Customer-facing delivery by air is a different problem. A drone usually flies one order from a store to one address, so there is no multi-stop route to sequence. The planning questions are instead which stores to equip, how many customers each can reach, and how to schedule aircraft. Wing announced on January 11, 2026, that it and Walmart would add 150 stores over the following year, with a network of more than 270 locations in 2027 reaching over 40 million Americans, according to Wing.
A later Wing announcement, dated October 5, 2026, added Denver and Seattle to launch in 2027 and said the plan covers nearly 20 major metros. It reports speeds up to 60 miles per hour (about 97 kilometers per hour) and payloads up to five pounds. These are Wing's statements, and delivery coverage can change as permits and launches proceed.
FAQ
Does Walmart use AI to plan routes?
Walmart describes Load Planner as an optimization system built on metaheuristics and mathematical programming. Whether to call that AI depends on definition, since it is search and optimization, not a learned model.
Is Load Planner the same as Route Optimization?
Trade coverage presents Route Optimization as the version of Walmart's routing technology offered to outside businesses from March 2024. The coverage ties it to the same Edelman-winning work.
Is this about last-mile delivery?
No. Load Planner covers truck moves between distribution centers and stores. Home delivery by drone is handled through partners such as Wing.
How trustworthy are the savings figures?
They come from Walmart and its authors. The paper is peer reviewed, but the totals describe Walmart's own operations and cannot be checked from outside.
Related reading
- AI across Walmart's operations
- How AI changes goods transportation
- Algorithms behind the salesman problem
- AI in drug delivery
More in Traveling salesman problem.
Last verified: October 2026
Sources
- Mehrotra, P. et al., "Optimizing Walmart's Supply Chain from Strategy to Execution," INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics 54(1), 2024, doi 10.1287/inte.2023.0093
- Wing, "Wing and Walmart expand drone delivery to 150 new stores coast to coast," January 11, 2026
- Wing, "Wing and Walmart name new metros to expand the nation's largest drone delivery network," October 5, 2026
- SupplyChainBrain, "Walmart to Sell AI Truck Routing Tool to Other Companies," March 18, 2024
- INFORMS, 2023 Franz Edelman Award coverage, Ohio State University Integrated Systems Engineering, May 2023
- Original vehicle routing formulation by Dantzig and Ramser (1959), as cited in the Walmart paper