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.
- 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.
- 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.
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; and
- Prevent overstaffing by using crews more efficiently and more densely.
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.
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 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.