Travel-feasible scheduling is a booking method that offers a time slot only if a qualified crew can actually reach the job in time, with travel calculated from where the truck will be at that hour, usually the previous job.
How feasibility is checked
For each candidate slot and each qualified technician, the check is:
Feasible if: End of previous job + Drive time from previous job ≤ Start of new slot and End of new slot + Drive time to next job ≤ Start of next job
Both conditions matter. The first asks whether the truck can get there. The second asks whether adding this job breaks the one after it. If either fails, the slot is not offered.
Say a technician finishes a job at 10:15 and the new address is 35 minutes away. A 10:30 slot fails the first check. An 11:00 slot passes, as long as the 11:00 job ends early enough to reach the 1:00 job. A calendar that only asks "is 10:30 empty?" would have sold the 10:30.
Why it matters for scheduling
Most schedulers check one thing when a customer asks for a time: is the block empty? An empty block and a reachable job are different facts. When the gap between them is discovered after booking, someone absorbs it: the technician runs late, the next customer waits, or the dispatcher pads the day.
Travel-feasible scheduling moves the check to the moment of the promise. That is the core of what CrewLink does: it builds live travel time into availability, checks feasibility before a slot is offered, and computes travel from the previous job rather than from the shop.
A common mistake
Treating it as the same thing as route optimization. Route optimization takes jobs that are already booked and finds the shortest order to run them. Travel-feasible scheduling decides which jobs get booked into which slots in the first place. If the day was promised in a bad shape, reordering it later helps only a little. The full comparison is in Route optimization vs. feasible scheduling.
Related terms
- Drive time is the input the feasibility check runs on.
- Route optimization is the after-booking step that reorders what is already on the board.
- Arrival window widths can shrink when every booked slot is known to be reachable.
- Backtracking is what feasible booking prevents.
Common questions
Does travel-feasible scheduling mean offering fewer times?
Sometimes. It removes times the drive makes impossible. The customer gets a shorter list, but every time on it can be kept.
Does it replace route optimization?
No. They work at different moments. Feasible booking shapes the day as jobs come in. Route optimization can still tidy the order afterward, with much less left to fix.
Why calculate travel from the previous job instead of the shop?
Because the truck is not at the shop at 2:00 p.m. It is wherever the 1:00 job was. Travel from the shop understates or overstates the real drive, depending on where that job sits.