AI-generated Key Takeaways
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This documentation outlines how to create and manage scheduled tasks, representing driver activities, within the Google Maps Mobility scheduled tasks service.
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Tasks, which can be either OPEN or CLOSED, are assigned to vehicle stops, and their progress is updated as the vehicle travels to and completes these stops.
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The lifecycle of a task involves creation, scheduling by assigning to a vehicle stop, updating progress, sharing journey details with stakeholders, and finalization by closing and setting the outcome.
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Fleet Engine provides tools for consumers to track shipment status and for administrators to monitor fleet locations and progress in near real-time.
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To successfully use this service, prior familiarity with Fleet Engine, vehicle basics for on-demand services, and task basics for scheduled tasks is assumed.
The documentation in this section shows how to create and work with scheduled tasks using the Google Maps Mobility scheduled tasks service. It assumes familiarity with the following:
- Fleet Engine: You should be familiar with Fleet Engine implementation details, request mechanisms, and security. For that, see What is the Fleet Engine service? and the security topics in Set up Fleet Engine .
- Vehicles basicsfor on-demand services. See Introduction to vehicles .
- Task basicsfor scheduled task services. See Scheduled tasks
The Task
resource that you'll use is available in both gRPC
and REST
.
In Fleet Engine for scheduled tasks, a task represents a driver activity that fulfills a scheduled shipment or service for your consumers. You assign tasks to vehicle stop locations where they are to be completed, and the vehicle travels to those stops.
A task has two possible states, OPEN
or CLOSED
. These states indicate
whether the task is active or not in the system. As the journey evolves for an
active task, you report this to Fleet Engine by updating the vehicle stop
associated with the task, which is either ENROUTE or ARRIVED. Once the driver
completes tasks and leaves the stop, you remove the stop from the list of stops
on the vehicle. For more about
tasks and their relationship to stops and vehicles, see Scheduled tasks
in Fleet Engine essentials.
Life of a task
In order to track each task in Fleet Engine, you must first create a Task
entity. See either gRCP
or REST
for reference.
The following table describes an example end-to-end flow of a task created in your system and its lifecycle stages in Fleet Engine. It assumes you have set up Fleet Engine and have a vehicle for the task, with location updates enabled in the driver app. See Driver SDK: Scheduled tasks .
CreateTrip
with required fields, such as the type of task and
the location. It can also supply other configurations at this point,
such as target time window, sharing task progress, and custom
attributes. See Create shipment tasks
and the related guides.When you schedule a task for delivery, you issue 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. See Update delivery vehicle tasks .
- Shipment information for consumers. With this
solution, consumers can see the status of their package along with the
vehicle location information you permit them to view.
See Consumer sharing for scheduled tasks . - Fleet status information for administrators. With
this solution, fleet administrators can visualize the locations of
delivery vehicles and their stops in your fleets in near real time.
If the route for a vehicle is known, the map view component animates
that vehicle as it moves along its predicted path.
See the JavaScript Fleet Tracking library .
- Close the task: Closing a shipment task indicates that that task is no longer active.
- Set the task outcome: Once a task is closed, you indicate either a successful or failed task to indicate if the delivery took place or not. This is an important part of finalizing a task to show the delivery outcome in your consumer experience and to ensure correct billing for the Fleet Engine service.
Task sequence flow
The following diagram shows a detailed flow of a task lifecycle.
