Manual Assignment

Vehicles must be "assigned" to specific trips within the Swiftly platform in order to display accurate real-time arrival predictions for passengers and to analyze historical vehicle performance. While Swiftly uses smart algorithms to automatically assign most vehicles to trips and blocks, there may be cases where you'd like to manually assign vehicles to routes. In these cases, you can use the manual assignment tool to override the auto-assignment functionality. Manual assignment is only available in the Live Operations product. 

The Basics

• Swiftly will allow any vehicle to be assigned to any route with an active schedule block. 
• Once a vehicle is manually assigned, it will remain assigned to that route, trip, and block so long as it continues to follow the route path (spatial matching) and so long as it arrives at stops close to the scheduled times (temporal matching). Therefore, the parameters for remaining assigned are consistent for all vehicles, whether they were assigned automatically or manually.
• If you assign a vehicle to a block that's already been assigned, the previously assigned vehicle will be removed and become "unassigned".
• Assignment changes will affect live predictions on customer-facing tools as well as all performance reporting in Swiftly Insights.
• Not all dashboard accounts have permission to manually assign vehicles.

How to Manually Assign a Vehicle: 

You can access the manual assignment tool from the Swiftly Dashboard Live Operations product.

1. Click on the vehicle you’d like to assign. A vehicle details window will pop up.
2. Click on the Change Assignment button. A window will appear with a table displaying information about routes (only active routes will appear) and missing assignments (these cells will display which blocks are missing vehicle assignments out of all active routes. For example: “3 (of 20)” means that out of 20 active blocks, there are 3 that are missing vehicle assignments.
3. Select the appropriate route from the Action column
4. A new table listing all active blocks for your selected route will appear. This table will contain the following information: Block ID, Status ("Assigned” or “Missing Assignment” indicates whether a vehicle is already assigned to the block), Start Time/End Time (indicates the start of the first trip of the block, and the end time of the last trip)
5. Select the desired block from the Action column.
6. A confirmation screen will appear, reviewing the vehicle, route, and block information you’ve selected. Click Confirm Assignment to finalize this action.
7. You should see a pop-up that confirms the assignment was successful 

*If you receive a pop-up that does not confirm the assignment was successful, here are some reasons why: Why can't I use the manual assignment tool?

 

How early can we assign vehicles to a block?

Agencies are able to use the Assign Vehicle link shown below to assign a vehicle to the future block. The button becomes available one hour before the block start time. If you try to assign earlier than that, the button may not be visible.

To see blocks that begin more than five minutes in the future, you must turn on the Upcoming Trips toggle on the left.

This allows dispatchers to bulk assign in the morning to prepare for the rest of the day’s service.

If a Manual Assignment is made in error, just manually assign the vehicle to the appropriate active block again.

Can other assignment sources overtake manual assignment?

Manual assignment overrides other assignment sources, so once you manually assign a vehicle to a route/block, no other assignment source will be able to take over and change that assignment.

• Yes
• Details
• Example with an image

How do I read the ‘missing assignment’ column

• The “Missing Assignments” column will display the number of missing assignments within that route.
  • The first number ”1 of #” represents missing block assignments
  • The second number “# of (6)” represents available blocks
• So (from the screenshot below) route 202 - Flamingo is showing there is 1 missing assignment out of 12 active assignments.
• After selecting a vehicle from Live Maps it will display all routes currently active in your GTFS.

• Once you hit the select button corresponding to the route you want, it will open up and show you all routes including the one that has been designated as ‘missing assignment’.

This details that 1 block out of 12 blocks inside the route you choose has no vehicle assigned to it. Therefore, block 110406 is missing an assignment.