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Route Planning and Dispatch

Route Planning and Dispatch overview Route Planning and Dispatch is an On-demand Rides and Deliveries Solution capability that helps fleet managers find optimal assignments for pairing drivers with ride and delivery tasks. You achieve route planning and dispatch by using one of the following two dispatch-related APIs:

What can you do with Route Planning and Dispatch?

Route Planning and Dispatch lets you optimize the pairing of drivers with a route that provides the best results in terms of efficiency, cost, and user satisfaction.

Why should you use Route Planning and Dispatch?

Use route planning and dispatch to help your customers get to their destination, or to receive their order—in the shortest amount of time, and for the least cost to you.

The benefits of using route planning and dispatch extend to drivers, who will experience more time earning money, and less idle time. And fleet operators will achieve lower overall operating costs due to increased efficiency.

How to use Route Planning and Dispatch

You can take one of two approaches to implement the route planning and dispatch capability:

Stateless
Stateful

Stateless approach

The stateless approach involves using Routes Preferred API, where you can get precisely computed route metrics such as travel time and distance. The API returns a ranked list of nearby drivers who can accept the ride or delivery request.

Using this approach, you must maintain the state of your drivers, vehicles, and trips on your backend. This is the best approach to use if you have already built a dispatch engine.

Stateful approach

This approach involves sending the SearchVehicles() request message, which you can use to pair consumers to available vehicles. For more information, see Finding nearby drivers. With this API, you can search for nearby drivers (or vehicles) for a given task's pick-up location. You can filter by radius, by driver count, by trip, or by vehicle attributes. The API returns a ranked list of nearby drivers who are available to accept the ride or delivery request.

In this approach, Fleet Engine maintains the state of your drivers, vehicles, and trips. As such, this is the best approach to use if you're just starting your project, and you haven't built a full dispatch engine.