Update delivery vehicle tasks

This document assumes familiarity with the following:

In a real-world delivery scenario, businesses assign delivery shipment tasks to drivers, who then use a vehicle to deliver them to the recipient at a planned location, such as a residence or a delivery room in a building complex. You model this in Fleet Engine by creating a task and issuing a delivery vehicle update request, which then updates the vehicle entity with a list of stops to travel. You assign each stop a list of tasks to be completed at the stop.

You can update vehicle tasks at any time, but typically you do this for the following purposes:

  • Schedule tasks for a vehicle to complete. You can do this either with an update request that adds a new stop to the vehicle, or by an update request that adds a new task to an existing stop.
  • Update the order of existing tasks associated with a given vehicle stop.
  • Change the location of the task completion. By default, Fleet Engine marks the task completion location as the same location as the vehicle stop associated with the task. If you prefer, you can specify specific locations for individual tasks. For example, you might have a vehicle stop at a large complex to delivery a number of packages, each of which is assigned a specific mail delivery room.
  • Close any previously assigned tasks to leave them out of the updated ordering. See Finalize tasks for details.

Schedule or change delivery tasks

You can schedule or change tasks assigned to a vehicle from either a server environment, or by using the Driver SDK if you provide the driver the ability to manage tasks using a trusted device. Use only one method so that you avoid race conditions and maintain a single source of truth.

To change a shipment from one vehicle to another, close the original task and recreate it before assigning to a different vehicle. If you update a delivery vehicle to include a task that is already assigned to a different vehicle, you get an error.

Required fields for updating tasks

This section documents the required fields to set when updating a task for a vehicle. No optional fields are provided. Fleet engine ignores all other fields in the entity for the update.

Required fieldValue
remainingVehicleJourneySegments A list of journey segments for tasks in the order they should be executed. The first task in the list is executed first.
remainingVehicleJourneySegments[i].stop The stop for task i in the list.
remainingVehicleJourneySegments[i].stop.plannedLocation The planned location for the stop.
remainingVehicleJourneySegments[i].stop.tasks A list of tasks to be performed at this vehicle stop.
remainingVehicleJourneySegments[i].stop.state State.NEW

Assign tasks example

The following examples show how to use the Java gRPC library and an HTTP REST call to UpdateDeliveryVehicle to add two new tasks for the vehicle.

gRPC

 static final String PROJECT_ID = "my-delivery-co-gcp-project";
 static final String VEHICLE_ID = "vehicle-8241890";
 static final String TASK1_ID = "task-756390";
 static final String TASK2_ID = "task-849263";

 DeliveryServiceBlockingStub deliveryService =
   DeliveryServiceGrpc.newBlockingStub(channel);

 // Vehicle settings
 String vehicleName = "providers/" + PROJECT_ID + "/deliveryVehicles/" + VEHICLE_ID;
 DeliveryVehicle deliveryVehicle = DeliveryVehicle.newBuilder()
     .addRemainingVehicleJourneySegments(VehicleJourneySegment.newBuilder()  // 1st stop
        .setStop(VehicleStop.newBuilder()
            .setPlannedLocation(LocationInfo.newBuilder()
                .setPoint(LatLng.newBuilder()
                    .setLatitude(37.7749)
                    .setLongitude(122.4194)))
            .addTasks(TaskInfo.newBuilder().setTaskId(TASK1_ID))
            .setState(VehicleStop.State.NEW)))
     .addRemainingVehicleJourneySegments(VehicleJourneySegment.newBuilder()  // 2nd stop
        .setStop(VehicleStop.newBuilder()
            .setPlannedLocation(LocationInfo.newBuilder()
                .setPoint(LatLng.newBuilder()
                    .setLatitude(37.3382)
                    .setLongitude(121.8863)))
            .addTasks(TaskInfo.newBuilder().setTaskId(TASK2_ID))
            .setState(VehicleStop.State.NEW)))
     .build();

 // DeliveryVehicle request
 UpdateDeliveryVehicleRequest updateDeliveryRequest =
   UpdateDeliveryVehicleRequest.newBuilder()  // No need for the header
       .setName(vehicleName)
       .setDeliveryVehicle(deliveryVehicle)
       .setUpdateMask(FieldMask.newBuilder().addPaths("remaining_vehicle_journey_segments"))
       .build();

 try {
   DeliveryVehicle updatedDeliveryVehicle =
       deliveryService.updateDeliveryVehicle(updateDeliveryVehicleRequest);
 } catch (StatusRuntimeException e) {
   Status s = e.getStatus();
   switch (s.getCode()) {
      case NOT_FOUND:
        break;
      case PERMISSION_DENIED:
        break;
   }
   return;
 }

REST

 PATCH https://fleetengine.googleapis.com/v1/providers/<project_id>/deliveryVehicles/<id>?updateMask=remainingVehicleJourneySegments`

  • <id> is a unique identifier for a delivery vehicle in your fleet for which you intend to update the task ordering. It is the identifier that you specified when creating the vehicle.

  • The request header must contain a field Authorization with the value Bearer <token>, where <token> is issued by your server according to the guidelines described in Service account roles and JSON Web tokens.

  • The request body must contain a DeliveryVehicle entity

Example curl command:

  # Set JWT, PROJECT_ID, VEHICLE_ID, TASK1_ID, and TASK2_ID in the local
  # environment
  curl -X PATCH "https://fleetengine.googleapis.com/v1/providers/${PROJECT_ID}/deliveryVehicles/${VEHICLE_ID}?updateMask=remainingVehicleJourneySegments" \
    -H "Content-type: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer ${JWT}" \
    --data-binary @- << EOM
  {
    "remainingVehicleJourneySegments": [
      {
        "stop": {
          "state": "NEW",
          "plannedLocation": {
            "point": {
              "latitude": 37.7749,
              "longitude": -122.084061
            }
          },
          "tasks": [
            {
              "taskId": "${TASK1_ID}"
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "stop": {
          "state": "NEW",
          "plannedLocation": {
            "point": {
              "latitude": 37.3382,
              "longitude": 121.8863
            }
          },
          "tasks": [
            {
              "taskId": "${TASK2_ID}"
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
  EOM

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