Vehicle Allocation

Vehicle allocation is what happens during a phase running in assign_vehicles mode (or the legacy allocate mode) in the Orchestrator. The active engine — greedy, vroom, or any extension-registered engine — evaluates each available vehicle against the orders in the pool and produces a vehicle-to-order assignment as part of the phase's output.

How Vehicle Allocation Works

For every order in the phase's input set, the engine considers each available vehicle:

1. Availability check — vehicle must have status = active and online = true
2. Driver link — if a driver is already paired with the vehicle, the vehicle goes with that driver
3. Location — the vehicle's current location is the starting point for distance and time calculations
4. Capacity — when the phase has Respect Capacity enabled and orders have weight/volume data, the vehicle's payload_capacity and payload_capacity_volume are used to enforce load limits

Vehicle Attributes Used in Allocation

Assigning Vehicles to Drivers

For predictable allocation results, link vehicles to drivers before running a phase:

1. Open Fleet-Ops → Resources → Drivers
2. Open a driver record and set their Vehicle to a specific vehicle
3. Phases that touch this driver will route the driver+vehicle pair together

If a driver has no vehicle assigned, an assign_drivers phase can pair them with an unassigned vehicle in the same run, or the phase can run driver-only assignment without capacity enforcement.

Fleet-Based Scoping

In the Orchestrator Workbench, you can scope vehicle allocation to a specific Fleet. Only vehicles that belong to the selected fleet will be included in the resource pool. This is useful for running separate optimization passes for different operational zones or service types.

Online Vehicle Status

Vehicles become "online" when their assigned driver goes online in the Navigator app, or when a connected telematics device reports active. The Orchestrator's resource panel shows:

• Online vehicles — available for allocation
• Offline vehicles — excluded from the current run
• In-use vehicles — already assigned to an active order (excluded from new allocation)

Manual Vehicle Override

Even after an Orchestrator run, vehicle assignments can be changed manually. In the Workbench results panel, click an assigned order and use the Vehicle dropdown to select a different vehicle before committing. In the order detail panel, you can also reassign the vehicle directly on any order.

Next Steps

• Payload & Capacity Allocation — configuring weight and volume constraints
• Orchestrator Settings — set the default engine and global allocation constraints