How to integrate pre-established rounds into Urbantz

If prior to sending tasks to Urbantz you determine for each task which round they should belong to and at which sequence they should be, you can add this information to your tasks and Urbantz will create the rounds accordingly. You could typically adopt this way of working if you use your own optimization system.

We call this type of round "preset rounds".

Overview

1. Optimization configuration
2. If announced by file
3. If announced by API
4. Optimizing by API

1. Optimization configuration

Configuring an optimization is a prerequisite for being able to create rounds automatically. To be able to preserve the round names and sequences provided at the announcement, the type of optimization has to be adapted. 
Instead of the usual "Find best rounds", the option "Preserve the rounds and sequences provided" needs to be chosen in the configuration.

2. If announcing by file

If you work with file announcements, you need to provide a file that contains a column with the round name and another one with the sequence (if you know the sequence ahead). The field mapping of your flow needs to be configured accordingly (see also: How to define and implement a flow?).

When announcing using this particular flow, each task needs to be accompanied by a round name. The sequence is optional.

In practice:

• Configure the flow and the optimization
• Announce tasks including round (and sequence) information
• Create rounds by optimizing via the Announcement page

Once the optimization is launched via the Announcement page, Urbantz will calculate the round details including start time, end time, ETAs, etc. Round name and if provided sequence will be respected.

3. If announced by API

Similar to announcing by file, you can announce round and sequence information per task by API. Round information is mandatory, sequence information is optional. The general process does not differ from the one described above:

• Configure the flow and the optimization
• Announce tasks including round (and sequence) information
• Create rounds by optimizing via the Announcement page

4. Optimizing by API

We recommend using our API to launch optimizations if you want to create rounds in Urbantz that reflect as much as possible the rounds that were planned ahead of using Urbantz.

The benefit of an API launch is that you will be able to push additional information about the round to Urbantz: round start time, round end time, possible breaks (= a stop), vehicle, driver, hub etc. . Urbantz will create rounds exactly as you want them to be.

For details please see our API documentation in the section Rounds: create preset rounds.

In practice:

• Announce tasks
• POST the information about the rounds that have to be created to Urbantz to launch the optimization.

No need to optimize rounds via the Announcement tab if you use this API route. 

ℹ️  Changes applied in the Round Editor, can't be undone.

ℹ️  All constraints put in place on your platform will be ignored if our API is used.