Self-drive mode allows AngelTrack to automatically assign calls to your units according to optimal routing, as determined by the Vertex AI.
If you are satisfied with Vertex's dispatch board solutions, you can allow it to run your dispatch board, automatically assigning calls through the next hour according to the ever-changing optimal solution. Your dispatchers can intervene and override whenever they wish.
Vertex License Required
You must have an active Vertex license to use self-drive.
You can activate Vertex's add-on license by visiting your Feature Buffet. To learn more about licensing of AngelTrack add-ons, please visit the Feature Buffet Guide.
Prerequisites
- Vertex's full-day solutions are accurate only if it knows what shifts it will have throughout the day and into the evening. Therefore, all of the day's shifts must be on the books -- even if they are not active yet -- when you activate self-drive in the morning. You don't have to book future dates if you don't want to, but you must at least book all shifts occurring on the current day. To learn more about booking your shifts in advance, please visit the Scheduling Guide.
- Each shift must always have its full and correct capabilities recorded. This means your vehicles must have their capabilities properly recorded, and your crew members must have all of their certificates recorded, including their CPR cards if AngelTrack is configured to enforce this. You always have the option to manually set a shift's capabilities when you book it, but in the long run it's easier to keep all the records up-to-date so that AngelTrack can calculate everyone's capabilities automatically. To learn more, please read the Service Levels Guide and the Certificate Tracking Guide.
- Your dispatchers must still manage the crew schedule, including any exceptions, last-minute swaps and adjustments, and interventions for crews who are late arriving for work. Vertex assumes that any scheduled shift will arrive for work on-time, or if already late, will arrive within the next fifteen minutes, and thus may pre-assign calls to them.
- You also must get your Vertex costing and adjustment settings tested and tweaked for your particular caseload. Vertex comes pre-configured with typical settings, but every provider is different, and so at least some of the defaults will probably turn out to be sub-optimal. To get Vertex dialed-in, you must use it frequently, then make small adjustments, then use it more, then more small adjustments, and so on, until its solutions are consistently practical for your crews and caseload. That means its solutions do not consistently overload or underload your shifts. There will always be exceptions, and crazy days where too many things run late or finish early, but the goal is that Vertex produces solutions which are consistently at least as good as human dispatchers. Do not attempt to use self-drive until you've accomplished this.
Onboarding
Self-drive is potentially disruptive, if some dispatchers are not trained for it, or if some of the prerequisites are incomplete.
Self-drive is a division of responsibility, allowing the AI to perform ordinary schedule assignments while human dispatchers handle all the extraordinary things -- out-of-band events like last-minute cancellations, vehicle and crew swaps, lift assists, and all the rest of the managed chaos of our industry. Being a division of responsibility, all staff must be trained and on board, or else it will result in arm-wrestling between software and humans.
Agencies wishing to use self-drive should first use Vertex on a daily basis for three months, including its full-day solver, mid-day solver, work-in solver, and suggester features, to get Vertex's costing and other adjustments dialed in, and establish or update dispatch bookkeeping protocols that ensure Vertex always has accurate data for trips and shifts. Vertex especially depends on having accurate data in each dispatch's activation time, pickup time, and dropoff time datafields, so all dispatchers must be trained to be conscious of this.
Please also provide any feedback to AngelTrack LLC about shortcomings you may discover for your unique situation.
When you are ready, you may enable self-drive from the Preferences page, under Settings. Self-drive is an extension of AngelTrack's unattended dispatch mode, which you may already be familiar with. Once enabled, you can activate it and deactivate it as often as you wish. As such, you can use self-drive as a pinch-hitter, to cover your dispatch board whenever your dispatchers are unavailable.
How it Works
Self-drive mode monitors your dispatch board, constantly re-solving the plan to take account of all the changes and delays that inevitably occur as the day progresses.
Although it always solves the remaining day in order to find savings later due to prepositioning, Vertex Self-Drive only assigns the next hour, leaving the rest of the day undecided. This is important, because delays and work-ins and cancellations can disrupt any plans for the future.
That said, sometimes Vertex will pre-assign more than an hour's worth of calls to a unit if necessary to capture a daisy-chain, like a wheelchair van performing a double load, consisting of pickup + pickup + dropoff + pickup + dropoff + dropoff, or similar.
If there are any disruptive events, like a shift ending early, or a call unexpectedly cancelling, Vertex may change or cancel the assignments it made previously, insofar as those units have not yet gone enroute. This is called a "hard solve". As such, you will sometimes see Vertex rearrange your upcoming call assignments as the day progresses. This is called "churn" and you can monitor it on the Self-Drive Heartbeat page.
Because Vertex always plans the whole rest of the day when deciding the next hour's worth of assignments, it will sometimes make odd choices of which shift to send. It does this to preposition those units more closely to the calls occurring later in the day. For example, if the first ALS pickup is at 14:00 across town, it may use an ALS unit to run a 09:00 wheelchair call that drops off across town, leaving the ALS unit closer to the 14:00 pickup... even though you had wheelchair vans on standby.
Cooperative Dispatching
Vertex Self-Drive will not touch any call assignment that was made by a human.
It will rearrange only its own call assignments, and of course any unassigned calls and units. This allows your dispatchers to assign specific calls and/or specific units, and Vertex will work around them.
Nor will Vertex touch any call assignment where a crew has already gone enroute; that privilege is reserved to human dispatchers.
This means your dispatchers can assign whatever specific calls they like, and then let Vertex assign the rest. Human intervention is needed for things like lift assists, multi-responder situations, crew swaps, refusals, and all the other low-level chaos that occurs throughout the day. Basically, if the phone rings, then a human needs to handle it; otherwise, let Vertex perform the assignments.
Surge Units
Self-drive mode will not use your surge units, if any; it always leaves them idle. It is up to your dispatchers to assign them to last-minute calls as necessary.
By default, all units are available to Vertex; to become surge units, you must specifically designate them as such during shift creation, so you don't have to do anything if you don't want any of your shifts to be excluded from Vertex.
To learn more about surge units, please visit the Vertex Guide.
Part-Time Dispatching
Vertex Self-Drive can work as your dispatcher on a part time basis. You can switch it on and off whenever you like. For example:
You could activate it every night, after you've got tomorrow's shifts scheduled, and then leave it running until your morning dispatcher arrives for work; that way, if she oversleeps or gets sick, you're covered until a replacement sits down and takes over.
You could use it to cover for your dispatch office when short-handed, or when temporarily overloaded, such as if your dispatcher must jump into a wheelchair van to give a lift assist or run a quick wheelchair call.
You could use it just in the evenings and overnight, then switch it off in the morning.
You could use it to cover weekends or holidays.
You could use it when unexpectedly staffed with only a novice dispatcher who is still learning the ropes and the call schedule.
Interaction with Unattended Mode
Vertex Self-Drive is an extension of the "Limited" mode of the Unattended Dispatch feature.
That means crews can self-close their own calls, and change their transport destinations, without calling the dispatch office, whenever Vertex Self-Drive is active.
Thus, your crews will need to learn how to use Unattended Mode. To learn more, please visit the Unattended Mode Guide .
Vertex Self-Drive is not for use with AngelTrack's Full Self-Dispatch Mode, where crews book and assign their own calls, without any dispatcher involvement. To learn more about this, please visit the Self-Dispatch Mode Guide.
Crew Scheduling
Vertex will pre-assign calls to shifts that are scheduled for later in the day, same as a human dispatcher would.
If a scheduled crew is late arriving, its pre-assigned calls may go late. If the scheduled crew is more than an hour late in arriving for work, Vertex will cancel their scheduled shift, and reassign their calls elsewhere.
Zones
If you use AngelTrack's zones feature, then Vertex Self-Drive will separately solve every defined zone that has at least one available shift... not including the built-in zone named Global. If no defined zone has at least one available shift, then Self-Drive will instead solve Global, handling all calls from all zones using all shifts from all zones.
This means you cannot use a Global+1 zone arrangement, where half your service area is covered by a defined zone while the other half all falls into 'Global'.
Instead, all points in your service area must fall into a defined zone, e.g. "East" and "West", rather than "East" and Global. Don't worry, this is easy to do using open-ended zones; to learn more, please visit the Zones Guide.
Monitoring
To watch Vertex running, visit the Self-Drive Heartbeat page, available as a link from the Vertex Configuration page under Settings.
The Self-Drive Heartbeat page shows you the inputs and outputs from each self-drive heartbeat, which occurs once every three minutes. You will see numbers of calls and units, and the counts of new assignments or reassignments, and the ongoing cost calculations.
You can adjust Vertex's costing settings, and the related sliders for padding and delays, from the Vertex configuration page any time you like. Due to caching, all such changes will take effect in self-drive within about 30 minutes.
Journaling
All actions performed by Vertex in self-drive mode are recorded in the journals of the relevant dispatches. You can review these by using the Journal Search tool, available under Billing Home.
Vertex uses your shift records, your vehicle records, and your employee schedule, but never modifies them.
As mentioned above, you can also monitor the actions of Self Drive by visiting the Self Drive Heartbeat page, available from the Vertex Configuration page under Settings.
Critical Calls
Vertex knows how to assign critical calls, and will do so; however, Vertex never touches your surge units, and in any case the call-taker will probably want to pull an active unit off its current call in order to run the critical call. Therefore we recommend that human dispatchers perform all assignment of critical calls, and then let Vertex rearrange the rest of the call schedule around them.
That said, if the call-taker does not assign the critical call, Vertex will see it during its next re-solve, and will assign it then.