Vertex AI Dispatch Planner
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      Vertex Costing Guide

      Learn how the costing adjustments affect the Vertex AI Route Planner, and how to interpret its solution costs.

      AngelTrack's Vertex AI Route Planner has many costing adjustments, allowing you to influence its personality to better match your operation.

      Vertex.mediumHard Costs

      "Hard costs" are expenses which are easy to measure:

      • Vehicle mileage
      • Crew time

      Each hard cost is calculated from the costing data you configured on the Vertex Configuration page. For example, you might stipulate that a wheelchair van's hard costs are:

      • $2 per mile driven (whether or not patient loaded)
      • $14 per hour waiting (time not with a patient)
      • $16 per hour servicing (time with a patient other than transport)
      • $18 per hour driving (with or without patient onboard)

      The higher time costs reflect the elevated liability of being with a patient, if you like.

      AngelTrack is already pre-loaded with a reasonable set of hard costs for all service levels, so you do not need to configure your hard costs unless you want to alter Vertex's behavior.

      Automatic scale-up of hard costs

      One of Vertex's adjustments is a multiplier for on-call crews, representing the enhanced cost of assigning a call to an on-call unit who, therefore, must drive in and activate. By default this adjustment is 150%, but you can change that. (To learn more about on-call units, please visit the On Call Guide.) This cost multiplier is reflected in any Vertex solution's hard costs report.

      Vertex will also gradually scale up each shift's time costs (but not its mileage costs), increasing by one-half of a percent for each trip the crew has already completed, in order to reflect the crew's exhaustion and thus lightly steer Vertex into using other crews who are not so tired. For example, if one BLS unit has run six calls already today, and another BLS unit has run three, the first unit's time now costs 3% more than baseline, while the other unit's time now costs 1.5% more than baseline. This cost multiplier is minor, its only purpose is to steer Vertex's choices towards vehicles who've run fewer calls, and so it is not reflected in any Vertex solution's hard costs report. As a result it can cause the hard-cost totals in a Vertex solution to slightly mismatch your configured hard-costing settings.

      Soft Costs

      "Soft costs" are things that sort of have a dollar value:

      • Being late to a scheduled pickup;
      • Being late to a scheduled dropoff; and
      • Holding a shift past its scheduled off time (above and beyond its hard hourly cost).

      The aforementioned are not direct monetary costs, rather they are good-will costs. Nevertheless, Vertex needs a way to quantity them and compare them to the hard costs, therefore AngelTrack has a dollar-cost slider for each soft cost.

      In any solution result, hard costs are reported separately from soft costs, because the two aren't directly comparable.

      By increasing the soft costing sliders, you can cause Vertex to accept higher hard costs in order to avoid the higher soft costs. For example, if you quadruple the cost of late pickups, you will begin to see Vertex choosing longer routes (higher mileage costs) in order to arrive on-time, whereas before it would sometimes arrive late in order to save mileage.

      Time Left Over

      An important concept in Vertex is: Time left over.

      It means: The time interval between a crew's last call and their scheduled off time.

      There is no way to bring this quantity down to zero, because crews need time at the end of the day for cleanup, paperwork, and other chores.

      That said, you can think of Vertex as attempting to maximize your crews' time left over, in the sense that Vertex tries to get the dispatch board cleared in the shortest possible time. Insofar as Vertex succeeds in doing that, your crews will have more time left over.

      Over the long run, if you consistently see too much time left over, and the crews are running out of things to do in the last hour of their shifts, you can dial back your schedule a bit, sending crews home a little earlier due to the savings from Vertex.

      In any case, since Vertex is implicitly trying to maximize the time left over, the cost of that time is not counted in a Vertex solution's costs. This allows you to compare one solution against another in terms of dollars, because the solution which finishes the day earlier will cost less dollars (of crew time), possibly allowing crews to go home early.

      Priority Boosting

      Vertex calculates each trip's priority using these criteria:

      • Dispatch priority (scheduled / lower acuity / emergent / critical)
      • Service level (car / wheelchair / BLS / ALS / rescue / et cetera)
      • Direction (outbound / return)
      • Destination type (outbound dialysis trips are more sensitive to lateness)
      • Overdue for assignment and therefore already running late

      Taken together, those criteria will scale up or down the lateness soft-costs you've configured. 

      For example, an ALS call's lateness soft-costs are initially set by the Vertex soft-costs you configure, but Vertex then scales those amounts further upward, to reflect the fact that ALS calls are more sensitive to lateness than, say, wheelchair calls. Ditto for a dialysis call.

      This mechanism is also used by Vertex's Work-In Solver, when you direct it to analyze a last-minute call and you choose 'highest' or 'lowest' priority for fitting the new call into the schedule.

      Priority boosting makes the Vertex engine "feel" a higher urgency for some calls over others, however this boost is not reported back to you in the soft-cost totals for a solution. In other words, if you set a soft-cost of $10/minute for late pickups, and your dispatch board contains exactly one wheelchair call and one ALS call, Vertex will act as though the ALS call costs $60/minute to be late, because it's priority boosted; however, the actual lateness (if any) will still be reported to you in the solution's soft costs at the $10/minute base rate you configured.

      Default Soft-Costs

      By default, your soft-costings were configured like this:

      • Late to pickup: $1/minute
      • Late to dropoff: $2/minute
      • Shift held late: $3/minute

      These costs are low, which means: Vertex will frequently choose to be a bit late if by doing so it can save a lot of crew time and vehicle mileage.  Likewise it will often keep crews past their scheduled off times, if doing so allows a reduction in hard costs like mileage.

      If Vertex plans for too many late arrivals, or keeps crews past their off times too often, then increase your soft costing adjustments. You will then see Vertex react by allowing higher hard costs (usually more miles driven) in order to reduce lateness.

      "Flag late after"

      When you review a Vertex solution, the "Flag late after" adjustment controls which trips will blink to warn you of lateness.

      By default it is set to 20 minutes, which means:

      • A call will blink slowly if late to pickup or dropoff by at least 20 minutes;
      • It will blink quickly if late to pickup or dropoff by at least 40 minutes (20 times 2); and
      • It will blink very quickly if late to pickup or dropoff by at least 80 minutes (20 times 4). 

      By adjusting the "Flag late after" adjustment, you control how late a call must be before you'll see a visual indication which helps you readjust the solution. Combine this option with the soft-cost controls to help you find the sweet spot of being just a little late to save a lot of mileage.