When creating a Task, you can define its importance in the Advanced section of the Task form.
Depending on what you select, eLogii will consider this information when optimizing and creating Routes.
If the priority is high, the optimization will ensure that the Task is assigned and of greater importance than other Tasks; if it's set too low, it will first consider other Tasks and fit it only if there is room.
Other than selecting the Task priority from the drop-down menu, there is also the option of adding a number ranging from 1 to 1000 to define the importance, with 1 being the lowest and 1000 being the highest importance. By default, Normal priority is 0, while the values go up by 25 for each next selected option.
Alternatively, you can also define the Task priority after the task has been created by navigating to Tasks ⇒ Task Profile ⇒ Task Priority.
Click Save once the priority has been added.
During optimization, the values of Tasks are summed, and the system will try to create the route with the highest possible total priority
Please note that other factors come into play during optimization, such as Vehicle capacity, Driver schedule, Task time windows, and other constraints, which may sometimes result in the Task priority not being met as expected. This means that Tasks will not be optimized regardless of their priority over others if including them would mean breaking set constraints.
Another important thing to note is that priority doesn't necessarily impact the order of Task execution. We recommend utilizing the Task Execution order feature to determine the exact order of a Task in a route.
💡Pro tip - Automatically setting the priority based on Driver's skill
If you would like to automatically attribute a priority value to Tasks based on a specific Driver skill, you can accomplish that via Task rules. Set the source field as skills and define the desired skill you wish to trigger the automation, and in the target field, select priority and enter the value you wish to be attributed to the Tasks that contain the defined skill.
The same logic can be applied to any other entity you would like to use as a trigger for the priority change, so if skills are not something you utilize, you can choose any other Task element to trigger the Priority change.
In summary, the Task priority sets the "value" of assigning a Task to a route. The optimization engine aims to maximize the total value across all assigned Tasks. For example, suppose one Task has a priority of 100, and two others have a priority of 55 each. In that case, the engine will prefer assigning the two lower-priority Tasks (total value: 110) over the single high-priority one (value: 100), since the overall value is higher.
This means higher-priority Tasks may remain unassigned if assigning multiple lower-priority ones leads to a better overall result. Priorities can be set from 1 to 1000, which gives you flexibility to control behavior: you can either emphasize critical Tasks by giving them much higher priorities or encourage the completion of more medium-priority Tasks by keeping the differences smaller.
Note that 1 is the default baseline value, and any Task with a priority of 0 will automatically be treated as having a priority of 1.