TOC
CH1: Compass Basics
CH2: School Management
CH3: Student Management
CH4: Creating Stops
CH5: Vehicle Management
CH6: Generating Runs
Compass uses the term Vehicles to refer to all the vehicles available for route planning. But these generally include several types of vehicles that have different characteristics and, depending on those, users will need to discriminate which vehicles are suitable for the routes they want to design.
Vehicle Properties
In general terms, vehicle types need to be selected in accordance with the maximum number of riders and occupancy allowance, but also options of equipment and aids must be taken into account when assigning vehicles to service a specific route.
Some of these options are technical. For example, the availability of AVL or GPS systems is crucial for tracking and location purposes. Others, including maximum route and drive times or maximum total distance, are related to vehicle safety. Seat belts, safe vests, wheelchairs or specialties such as air condition or aides assigned, depend on Students’ needs.
Beyond that, customers can also consider operating costs per hour or per mile as additional options that address financial factors.
Fleets are held in depots and where these are located is an essential piece of information from the beginning of any routing project, since such locations will normally be the start and the final destination of every route. So, the location of those depots will also be decisive in the selection of vehicles.
Vehicle Management Tool
In order to undertake vehicle management tasks, users can access the Vehicle Management tool by clicking on the Vehicles tab located under the main toolbar, on the left section of the screen.
Vehicle search can be done with the aid of filters that are distributed in various sections:
- The first filter allows the selection of Vehicle Profiles from a drop-down menu. These Profiles are created to group vehicles with similar characteristics and equipment.
- The two following sections can be used to search for vehicles assigned to Schools or accessible at the existing depots by selecting the corresponding boxes in separate scroll-down menus.
- If needed, users can select vehicles with Wheelchairs, with Aide, with Air Condition, with Spare vehicle availability or AVL/GPS equipped.
- Vehicle Number and Attributes filters are also available.
- Finally, users can also search for Vehicles With No Runs during certain periods of time.
The Vehicle Management tool displays several buttons with different functionalities above the search result list:
- Find: Displays search results in the table below.
- Clear Filters and Results: Remove results from the table.
- Add to Workspace: Adds selected Vehicles to the Workspace so that they can be used to generate Runs.
- Add to Watch.
- Profiles: Gives access to the Vehicle Profile Management dialog.
- New: Adds a New Vehicle to the Scenario.
- Bulk Update: Updates the information of various Vehicles at the same time. To learn more, read the tutorial Editing Vehicles.
- Delete. Removes a Vehicle from the scenario.
The search results table shows the most relevant Vehicle Features of each of the listed Vehicles. These include:
- Vehicle Number, Configuration Type and Profile.
- Earliest time the Vehicle can leave the Depot and Latest time the Vehicle can leave the Depot.
- Assigned Depot.
- Use Type.
- Maximum number of Stops.
- Maximum ride Time.
- Number of Riders.
- Wheel Chair capacity.
- Number of Safe Vests and Seat Belts available.
- AVL equipped.
