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Smart Routing: vehicles and planner settings

4 min read

Table of Contents

Smart Routing is an add-on that plans the day’s deliveries and collections over your vehicles. It shares the stops between the vehicles and orders each vehicle’s stops inside the customers’ time slots, within each vehicle’s load and shift. Nothing changes until you accept the plan; the routes then show on Rentals › Schedule, the run sheets and the CSV as usual.

This page sets it up: your vehicles and the planner settings. Planning a day is on the next page: Smart Routing: plan the day, accept and send. The figures are on Smart Routing: reports.

What you need #

  • WooCommerce with Smart Routing 1.1.0 or newer. With Rentals & Bookings Regular (1.0.80 or newer) Smart Routing uses Regular’s Delivery & pickup and also routes your rentals. Delivery has to be switched on (Deliveries › Settings on its own, Rentals › Settings › Delivery & pickup with Regular); the Routes page shows only then.
  • Your vehicles as resources (below).
  • Your store address under WooCommerce › Settings › General: the vehicles start and end there (with Multi Location Inventory, at each location’s address).
  • Optional: Delivery by Distance with a map service, for road travel times.

Add your vehicles #

On its own: add your vehicles on the Routes page (Vehicles: name, colour, load, shift, start and end address). With Regular: vehicles are resources of type Vehicle under Rentals › Staff & resources; when you add Regular later, your vehicles move there for you and today’s and later routes keep them.

Each vehicle is a resource of type Vehicle:

  1. Go to Rentals › Staff & resources › Resources and add a resource.
  2. Name it (“Box truck 1”, “Sprinter van”) and choose the type Vehicle.
  3. Repeat for each vehicle.

They appear on Rentals › Routes under Vehicles:

The Vans table on Rentals, Routes: Box truck 1 and Box truck 2 carry 6 units and 1500 kg with a tail-lift, 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM; the Sprinter van carries 3 units and 900 kg, 9 AM to 5 PM
(1) Units: how many items the vehicle carries. (2) Weight in kg (and volume in m³). (3) Features. (4) The vehicle's own shift.
  • Units, kg and m³: the vehicle’s load. Leave a load empty for no limit. A stop’s units are its items.
  • Features: words a stop can ask for (tail-lift, refrigerated), comma separated. A stop that needs a feature only goes on a vehicle that has it.
  • Shift: when the vehicle may leave the depot and must be back. An empty shift uses the default below.

Click Save vehicles.

Planner settings #

The planner settings: default shift 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM, travel times Straight lines, the built-in planner with fields for an openrouteservice key and a VROOM server address, an average speed of 40 km/h, a road factor of 1.3, a stop may be late by 0 minutes, plan for least driving time, and email customers their window when the routes are sent
(1) The default shift. (2) Travel times: by road or straight lines. (3) The planner. (4) How late a stop may be. (5) Least driving time or fewest kilometers. (6) Email customers their window.
  • Default shift: when a vehicle has no shift of its own, it leaves the depot no earlier and must be back by the end.
  • Travel times: By road uses the routing service and key set on Delivery by Distance’s Distance source tab (each leg kept in its cache); when it has none or fails, straight lines are used. Straight lines use the Average speed (km/h) and the Road factor (how much longer the road is than a straight line; 1.3 in most towns).
  • Planner: Built in (the default), openrouteservice (with your openrouteservice key) or My own VROOM server (its VROOM server address). An external planner gets only place numbers, travel times, time windows and loads, never names or addresses. When it can’t answer, the built-in planner plans the day and the board says so. Leave the key empty to keep the saved one.
  • A stop may be late by: minutes past the customer’s slot the planner may accept. 0 = never later than the slot.
  • Plan for: Least driving time or Fewest kilometres, after placing every stop it can with the fewest vehicles.
  • Email customers their window: off, When I send the routes to the drivers, or On the day, at an hour (store time). Each customer on the routes gets the half-hour window: “Your delivery is planned for 9:10 AM – 9:40 AM on Friday, October 16.” It is the planned arrival ± 15 minutes, always inside the slot they chose, and sent again only if the window moves.

Click Save settings.

Setup time at a stop #

How long a vehicle stays at a stop comes from each product’s Setup time at a stop (on its Delivery & pickup tab) or the store’s. A stop with a bounce house and a popcorn machine adds both.

For developers #

  • Vehicles’ routing details live in the resource’s meta.routing.
  • The filter siroutes_road_matrix answers the travel times first; siroutes_problem changes the day before planning (add stop features, kg or m³).
  • Actions siroutes_plan_saved (after Accept plan) and siroutes_routes_sent (after Send to drivers).
  • REST siroutes/v1: GET /day, GET /changes, POST /plan, POST /time, POST /save, POST /send. Reading needs the Schedule’s view permission; changing needs dispatch or manage_woocommerce.
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