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Relief cars, commonly referred to as taxis, ferry cars, or shuttles, play a crucial role in the transportation industry by facilitating the movement of drivers between key locations such as changeover points, depots, and other designated relief points. The main purpose of these vehicles is to ensure the smooth operation of transport services.
It's important to note that relief scheduling does not work the same way for schedules that use deadhead trips for public transport. This approach is more about making sure that drivers get to where they need to be rather than just moving vehicles around.
Below you will find all the prerequisites to setting up a relief car schedule.
Preference setup
When working on a schedule that requires relief cars, there are a couple of preferences that should to be set up before optimization.
Relief catalog - similar to the Travel catalog, but contains the trips only meant for relief cars.
Note: the relief cars + walks combination is not currently supported. Your origin and destination points within the catalog must be set to a place where the driver can start or finish their duty. For instance, your relief car must start at the depot and finish at the stop it would be relieving at.
If your operation requires walks where the car cannot reach stop locations due to bus only zones etc. There are a couple of workable solutions:
a) Incorporate the walk time into the relief car. If your standard operation consists of a 5-minute walk (depot to roadside) and then a 10-minute travel (roadside to bus station), you could make a relief travel from depot to the bus station of 15 minutes.
b) Add two trips into the catalog - A>B and B>C. Within the relief schedule this will then turn into A>B>C.
Travels - Relief car Preference - In here, you will select the relief car catalogue you have created and set the rules that you want to apply to the schedule i.e. number of relief cars, wait time etc.
Relief Points preference - Make sure the relief points have been set up for for the origin and destination of the relief car.
Optimization
Once the preferences above have been set up, you are ready to optimize your relief schedule.
To optimize a relief schedule, you would have to run you standard duty optimization first, because a relief schedule is generated based on the existing duty (crew) schedule.
Once you have a set of duties that are ready for relief cars, you can follow the same procedure as you would when optimizing duties, but make sure you toggle off the duty and vehicle optimization, and toggle on Optimize relief vehicles.
Once the optimization is finished, you will see a new icon added in the top-right corner of the Scheduling page.
Clicking on it will take you to your Relief vehicle schedule. To learn more about its layout, check this article.
You will also notice that new travel icons have now been attached in the Crew Schedule.