The "route first, partition later" strategy consists of finding a short tour through the set of customers sites first. This is equivalent to solve the traveling salesman problem (TSP) for the set of customer sites. Later the customers are partitioned into subsets in such a way that the total demand in each subset is less than the truck capacity. Customer sites in the same subset are consecutive on the TSP tour. Given a TSP tour, different solutions are possible depending on which is the first customer in the first truck. Among all such possible solutions, the one that minimizes the total distance traveled by all trucks is favored.

The "Improved TSP Algorithm" finds a shortest tour through the customer sites and the depot in each subset. It follows that the "Improved TSP Algorithm" dominates the "TSP Algorithm" but is not as fast.