AngelTrack's Vertex AI can help you pick the best unit when assigning an individual dispatch.
Although Vertex works best when assigning your entire call schedule at once, it can also help you with piecemeal trip assignments.
Prerequisites
To use the Vertex AI Suggester, you must first configure Vertex for your agency. To learn more about doing that, please visit the Vertex AI Guide.
You may also want to review the Vertex FAQ.
A related Vertex feature is the work-in solver, which you use when booking a new dispatch, to see how well it fits into the call schedule. For details, please visit the Vertex Work-In Solver Guide.
Free Test Drive
All AngelTrack customers get one free Vertex solve per day, and that includes the Suggester. This allows you to try out the system and see if it can make life easier in your dispatch office, and reduce miles driven.
If you like what you see, then consider activating your Vertex add-on license by visiting the Feature Buffet. With a Vertex license, the limit is raised to many solves per hour -- plenty to run your dispatch office all day long.
Limitations of Vertex AI
The Vertex AI Suggester has the same capabilities and limitations of the rest of the Vertex AI features. You can review those by visiting the Vertex AI Guide.
As a result, the Suggester may sometimes say that a certain trip is ineligible, for example if the trip is booked to an unknown location and hence has no GPS coordinates on file.
The Suggester has an additional limitation, on top of Vertex's standard limitations: The suggester will not propose to reassign any trip to a different unit. It only offers suggestions for unassigned trips. This is explained in detail below. If you want Vertex to reconsider all preassignments and potentially rearrange your whole schedule, then use a Mid-Day Solve instead, by clicking the Vertex icon in the dispatch sidebar.
How the Suggester Works
You may already be familiar with a Vertex feature called a Mid-Day Solve, which pulls every call that does not yet have a shift enroute (including calls that are pre-assigned), and reallocates them to all active and scheduled shifts. Any shift already enroute will be allowed to finish that call first. Therefore the Mid-Day Solve might reassign a pre-assigned call if it can find a better overall solution.
The Suggester is different: It treats all pre-assignments as immutable, i.e. it will not un-do any assignment already made by a dispatcher or by Vertex, even if the assigned crew has not yet gone enroute. The Suggester tries to fit all remaining unassigned calls into all the remaining idle hours of your active and scheduled shifts, and when it's found a solution, it tells you which shift got the dispatch in question.
In other words the Suggester is for agencies who do not preassign their call schedule, but rather play it by ear throughout the day, perhaps because they get a lot of last-minute and emergent calls. The Suggester takes account of the current and expected positions of all shifts, and the all rest of the day's call schedule, to find the lowest-cost solution for all variables, without touching any assignments made earlier.
Please note, the Suggester does not actually assign the call to the suggested shift, or make any changes to your dispatch board. Instead it simply shows you the shift that it thinks best.
Caveats
As the day wears on, and shifts move around, and dispatches are added and removed from the dispatch board, the Suggester will arrive at different solutions. Therefore its suggestion for any given trip might change even sixty seconds later.
Furthermore, the Suggester considers the entire remaining call schedule, and all remaining shifts, when deciding where to assign the selected dispatch. As a result it will sometimes make decisions that superficially appear to be odd. For example it will often assign wheelchair calls to BLS units in order to place the BLS units closer to any subsequent pickups, saving mileage by sending the wheelchair vans elsewhere. Vertex knows that BLS units cost more than wheelchair vans generally, according to your costing settings, but sometimes it's still cheaper to send the BLS unit if it will be later making pickups in the same area.
Important caveat: Blockouts
Whenever a shift has got a call assigned or preassigned, the Suggester blocks out that shift until the estimated clear time of all its assigned calls. This allows the Suggester to work around all trip assignments that you've already made, and fill out all the rest.
Because of this, the Suggester cannot backfill any gaps in your current assignments.
For example, suppose it's noon, and suppose you've preassigned a 16:00 pickup to Medic2. If you then run the Suggester, it will not consider Medic2 to be available until about 17:00, at the completion of the 16:00 pickup. The Suggester will not attempt to backfill any calls into the gap between 12:00 and 16:00. Of course you can manually drop some calls onto it whenever you like, but the Suggester will not.
Therefore, the Suggester works best in the absence of preassignments. It is better to leave the rest of the day as open as possible, so that Vertex can frequently reshuffle to improve its solutions as the day progresses.
Daisy-Chains / Double-Loads
Because of the aforementioned limitation with blockouts, the Suggester will sometimes propose assigning multiple calls to the chosen shift. It does this for two reasons:
- Preserve the savings of a daisy-chain, which is a string of sequential pickups and dropoffs that must be run by a single vehicle; and
- Avoiding leaving a gap in the shift's schedule prior to the selected dispatch, since the Suggester cannot later back-fill any gaps in a shift's assignments. (Only a Mid-Day Solve can do that, and only by being allowed to rearrange the entire rest of the day.)
Vertex Preference Settings
The work-in solver utilizes your default settings for Rush Hour Pad, Recovery Pad, and Flag Late After, which you can adjust by visiting the Preferences page under Settings. And of course it uses all the Vertex costing settings which you can review and update by visiting the Service Levels Configuration item under Settings.
Thus, if the suggester is pushing too many calls onto one unit, or too few, then you can adjust Vertex's time-padding settings to increase or decrease the time allocated for each trip. You can also increase or decrease its willingness to give lower-level calls to higher-level units (i.e. give a wheelchair call to a BLS unit) by adjusting the relative costs of BLS and wheelchair shifts.