Cloud Fleet Routing (CFR) Traffic Considerations

In October 2023, the Google CFR team defined which traffic data model is utilized when CFR's consider traffic feature (controlled by considerRoadTraffic boolean flag) is on vs. off:

• consider traffic on - When consider_road_traffic is true, CFR uses the "best_guess" traffic model to predict traffic. This blends both historical and live traffic with live traffic used only when the departure time is close to "now". Traffic is used only to post-process the routes, adjusting the route timings, but not for the optimization.
  
  
• consider traffic off - When consider_road_traffic is false, CFR uses average traffic conditions for the optimization i.e., the average travel duration over all possible departure times of the day, and the averaging is weighted by number of vehicles using the route at each time (averaged over all 'traces' along a certain road, *not* uniformly over time). So it's actually typically quite slower than the travel duration on clear roads if there is regular congestion on the path.

Google is continuously improving the traffic consideration capabilities of CFR but until any updates are released, the above definitions apply.