This is a Frequently Asked Questions list for the Vertex AI routing engine.
To learn more about the Vertex AI routing engine, please visit the Vertex Guide.
What all can Vertex do?
As of this writing, Vertex offers you the following capabilities:
- Solve your entire day's call schedule the night before, or the morning of, allocating all of your active and scheduled shifts in the most cost-efficient manner, taking account of their capabilities and using higher-level units to cover lower-level calls as necessary.
- Solve the remaining call schedule in the middle of the day. (This is called a Mid-Day Solve.)
- Speculatively re-solve the day's remaining call schedule to see what effect a last-minute work-in will have. To learn more about this please visit the Vertex Work-In Solver Guide.
- Speculatively solve a future day's call schedule to see the effect of fitting in another call.
- Re-solve the call schedule for a past date to see if the day was overstaffed, or to identify better ways to allocate a regular schedule. To learn more about this, please visit the Vertex Call Volume Analytics Guide.
- Suggest the optimal shift for running any particular call. To learn more about this, please visit the Vertex AI Suggester Guide.
- Visualize the current day's dispatch board and all of its current shifts and assignments, to show an animated map of pickups and assigned routes, as well as a handy tabular view of all active and planned shifts and their call assignments.
- Automatically assign / reassign your call schedule throughout the day, continuously re-calculating its solution to find the lowest cost plan to cover all trips. To learn more about this, please visit the Vertex Self-Drive Guide.
- Operate your dispatch board at night, on weekends, on holidays, or whenever you need an hour or two away from the office and must leave your dispatch board temporarily unattended.
By the time you read this, Vertex will probably have even more capabilities.
Using those capabilities, Vertex can provide the following benefits:
- Reduced slack mileage;
- Higher unit utilization (UHU);
- Reduce lack pickups by predicting days when an extra unit will be needed;
- Assist a call-taker in fitting a last-minute call into a full schedule;
- Prevent overstaffing by using crews more efficiently and more densely;
- Cover for dispatchers who are late arriving to work, or are sick; and
- Run the dispatch board on nights and weekends.
If Vertex can eliminate just one unnecessary trip across town and back per day, it will pay for itself, and all the rest is profit.
Why are the trip blocks so much wider than the actual time periods of the calls?
When a unit has nothing else to do, Vertex will send it early to its next call. Vertex assumes that the unit can take care of its other errands -- including food and refueling -- along the way.
Don't worry, it won't alter the dispatch to activate earlier than intended.
How do I use this "other date" option?
That option is for running analytics against your historical trip data, allowing Vertex to second-guess your dispatchers and perhaps identify some inefficiencies.
To learn more, visit the Vertex Analytics Guide.
Why does the suggester pick different shifts than the solver?
The Suggester is not allowed to change a shift assignment, even if the assigned vehicle has not yet gone enroute. Whereas the Solver (full-day or mid-day) can rearrange any existing assignments, as long as the assigned vehicle has not yet gone enroute. Thus, they will arrive at different conclusions once your day is underway.
Remember, the purpose of the solver is to re-jigger the entire call schedule at once, to assign or reassign all units in one fell swoop... whereas the suggester provides a-la-carte solutions for picking a shift to run an individual dispatch.
What's the point of solving for "yesterday"?
That option tells Vertex to quickly second-guess the trip assignments that were made yesterday, to check for
For comparison, Vertex will also show you the actual trip assignments and actual leg times that happened, plus any late pickups or late dropoffs. This option will let you see if Vertex could've done a lot better, if perhaps you are overstaffed. It also provides a neat way to visualize all of your units' activities across the day, even if you don't want to compare it to Vertex's solution.
If I don't use the crew scheduler, can I still use Vertex?
Yes.
If you never book your shifts in advance, you can still use Vertex to solve your day's call schedule, once you've got all your crews on-shift. You can also use Vertex's work-in solver to check how well a last-minute work-in will fit into the rest of the day's schedule. Finally, you can use Vertex to perform a mid-day solve, assigning whatever is left of the day's schedule to the optimal units.
If you use the scheduler to at least book tomorrow's crews the night before, then you can do all of the aforementioned, plus you can use Vertex that night and the next morning to solve the whole day's call schedule, and to check the impact of work-in calls.
You can always use the Vertex AI Suggester to help pick the best shift to run each call throughout the day.
You can in any case use Vertex's historical data analyzer to review your past call data to see if you are overstaffed, and other historical-data analytics that Vertex offers, to learn more about this please refer to the Vertex Historical Data Analytics Guide.
How do I get Vertex to allocate calls more densely?
If Vertex is spacing out your calls too much, such that your shifts are not as busy as you would like, you can adjust its padding amounts, by visiting the Vertex Configuration page under Settings. Here is how each pad setting affects the solution:
Recovery pad adds extra minutes to the dropoff of each call, allowing the crew extra time for cleanup, smoke breaks, bathroom breaks, and stops for gas and snacks.
Rush hour pad sends crews a bit early to their pickups during the busy hours, allowing extra time for traffic.,
Average pickup delay minutes specifies how much time is expected on-scene for each of the different service levels. If your crews and facilities are generally faster than this, you can decrease it, and Vertex will allow crews less time on scene.
Average dropoff delay minutes works likewise.
Vertex assigns too many calls to each crew, how do I allocate more time for each pickup?
Please refer to the discussion above, on the topic of allocating calls more densely.
Why does the Suggester sometimes pick a higher-level unit than necessary?
The Vertex Suggester solves your entire remaining call schedule, using all remaining and scheduled units, so that its choice of unit will best arrange all units for all remaining calls. In other words it thinks through the rest of the day before deciding who to send right now. Thus it will sometimes propose a higher-than-necessary unit for the trip, such as an ALS unit for a BLS call, or a BLS unit for a wheelchair call.
Why does the tabular view say a shift is not available until much later in the day?
Vertex is not allowed to reassign any call where the assigned shift has already gone enroute. Within a Vertex solution, therefore, such shifts are marked "not available" until the estimated completion time of their enroute trip(s).
For example, suppose you have a 12-hour truck active from 06:00 to 18:00. Normally Vertex is free to assign calls to it throughout the day... but suppose you are solving your entire day at 06:30, after that truck is already enroute to its first call, which will not finish until about 07:45. When Vertex performs your full-day solve, that truck will be marked as coming on-shift at 07:45, and furthermore, will have its starting position set to the dropoff point (the place where it will be located when it clears the call) rather than to its posting station.
The Vertex Suggester has an added limitation: It is not allowed to reassign any call that is already assigned -- even if the assigned unit has not yet gone enroute. Therefore, if you pre-assign several calls to a truck, the Suggester will consider that truck to be unavailable until it finishes all of its pre-assigned calls. The truck might therefore appear -- in the tabular view -- as coming on-shift in the middle of the day, or whenever AngelTrack estimates it will clear all of those calls.