Dispatcher Console

Overview

The Dispatcher Console is where you match available drivers with incoming outbound jobs in real time. It uses a four-stage Kanban pipeline that mirrors the physical lifecycle of a delivery job — from an unassigned order waiting in the backlog, through driver binding and departure, to final delivery completion.

Every assignment is validated against two live guardrails before it is accepted: vehicle capacity and vehicle status. This prevents overloading a truck or assigning a job to a vehicle currently in maintenance — without requiring the dispatcher to manually check Fleet Manager first.

Four-Stage Pipeline

Assignment Flow and Guardrails

Clicking Assign on a job card highlights eligible drivers in the Driver Dock panel on the left. Clicking a highlighted driver binds them to the job — but only after two automatic checks pass:

Driver Dock

The left panel of the Dispatcher Console shows a live list of all drivers bound to active vehicles. Each driver card displays:

• Live status dot — green (available), amber (in transit), red (offline)
• Driver name and assigned vehicle plate
• Capacity bar — visual representation of capacityUsedKg versus structuralCapacity

During an active assignment flow, only drivers whose vehicles can accept the job load are highlighted as eligible. Ineligible drivers are shown dimmed with a brief reason label.

Job Cards

Each job card in the Kanban pipeline shows:

• Priority badge — Critical (red), High (orange), Medium (amber), Low (slate)
• Load weight — total cargo weight in kg
• Destination — delivery address or city
• Assigned driver — appears after the job moves out of Unassigned Backlog

Jobs in Unassigned Backlog are automatically sorted with Critical priority at the top so dispatchers never miss urgent deliveries.

Creating a New Job

Click the + icon in the Unassigned Backlog column header to open the New Dispatch Job modal. New jobs always enter the pipeline at the Unassigned Backlog stage — there is no way to create a job directly into Manifest Ready, In Transit, or Completed.

The modal collects:

• Job title — required
• Priority — Low / Medium / High / Critical, defaults to Medium
• Load weight (kg) — used later by the capacity guardrail during assignment
• Destination — required
• Origin — optional
• Notes — optional free text

The Create Job button stays disabled until both Job title and Destination are filled in. On success the job appears immediately at the top or bottom of Unassigned Backlog depending on its priority rank, and a confirmation toast is shown. The new job is persisted the same way as every other dispatch record — through fleetService to /api/data/fleet.

AI Assistant

A dedicated AI Assistant is built into the Dispatcher Console. Open it from the vertical AI Assistant tab anchored to the right edge of the screen; it slides in as a dark-glass panel without leaving the board.

The assistant is always working from the live board — the full job list (every lane, not just what's currently visible) and the full driver pool (status, vehicle, load %) are sent as context with every message, so answers reflect the exact state of the screen at the moment you ask.

The panel supports the same conversation tools as every other TotalApp AI Assistant: New Chat, session History, Fullscreen mode, and Attach Knowledge for pulling in extra reference material from your knowledge base. Replies render as formatted Markdown. The assistant respects your global Writer Engine setting (Local CLI, Hosted API, or Ollama) from Settings → AI Assistant.

Moving Cards

Cards can be advanced through the pipeline in two ways:

• Inline action buttons — Depart (Manifest Ready → In Transit), Mark Done (In Transit → Completed), Hold (Manifest Ready → Backlog). This is the recommended method.
• Drag-and-drop — drag a card to the target column. The same state machine guards apply.

Data Persistence

All Dispatcher Console data is saved to the server. Every assignment, stage transition, and unassignment survives a page refresh. The following actions are supported:

• Load drivers — fetches the live driver list with capacity and status
• Load jobs — fetches all active jobs with their current stage
• Assign driver to job — runs guardrail checks then binds the driver
• Update job status — advances or regresses a job's stage
• Unassign job — removes the driver binding and returns the job to Backlog

Frequently Asked Questions