Visualizations
Learn how to use the visualizations in the Field Service Routing model to validate schedules, detect bottlenecks, and understand route structures.
The Field Service Routing model provides three complementary visualization views:
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Map view: Get a spatial overview of all routes across your service territory.
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By vehicle: Validate individual vehicle schedules as a Gantt-style timeline.
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By visit: Review each visit’s assignment and time window across all vehicles.
Used together, they transform an optimized routing plan from a black-box output into an explainable and continuously improvable operational plan.
Map view
Primary focus: Spatial overview of all vehicle routes.
The Map view displays all vehicle routes for a given day on a zoomable geographic map. Each vehicle is assigned a distinct color, and its full route is drawn as a colored line tracing the actual road path taken.
The map includes:
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Route lines: Colored paths showing the road network each vehicle follows.
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Depot markers: House icons at each vehicle’s home base or depot, colored to match their route.
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Visit markers: Circle markers at each visit location, color-coded by the assigned vehicle.
The spatial layout makes cross-route patterns immediately visible: which vehicles stay central, which cover outlying areas, and where routes overlap.
Click any element on the map to see its details:
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Depot markers: Shows the vehicle’s home base or starting location.
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Visit markers: Shows the visit’s time window, actual arrival time, duration, and assigned vehicle.
By vehicle
Primary focus: Detailed vehicle-level schedule validation.
The By vehicle view shows the schedule as a Gantt-style timeline where each row is a vehicle and each block is a scheduled visit.
Each block displays:
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Visit name and priority level.
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Required skill badge where applicable (for example, plumber, carpenter, electrician, painter).
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Required tags where applicable.
The view also shows:
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Travel segments: Small colored icons between blocks indicating travel time or transitions between visits.
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Breaks: Blocks representing scheduled breaks.
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Shift boundaries: Greyed-out hatching at the edges of the working day.
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Overtime: A faint orange extension beyond the shift boundary when a vehicle’s has allowed overtime.
Hover over any visit block to see a tooltip with detailed information about that visit, such as its time window, actual arrival time, duration, and required skills.
Each row represents a vehicle in its collapsed form. Click a row to expand it and see a breakdown per vehicle shift, including individual shift boundaries and assignments within each shift.
At the bottom left of the view, pagination controls allow you to navigate through vehicles.
When to use
Use the By vehicle view when you want to:
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Validate the full daily schedule for a specific vehicle.
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Check whether breaks are placed correctly within each vehicle’s shift.
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Identify vehicles that are running over their shift window.
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Explain individual assignments to dispatchers or field managers.
By visit
Primary focus: Visit-centric assignment and time window validation.
The By visit view shows a timeline where each row is a customer or visit location and each block represents the assigned vehicle and scheduled time window.
Each row displays on the left:
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Visit name, internal ID, and priority.
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Required skill badge.
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Tags where relevant.
Each block displays:
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The assigned vehicle name and shift ID.
Unassigned visits appear as empty rows with no block, making it easy to spot gaps in coverage at a glance.
When to use
Use the By visit view when you want to:
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Check that all visits have been assigned.
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Verify that visits are scheduled within their required time windows.
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Identify visits with missing skill coverage or unresolvable constraints.
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Review the customer-side view of the plan (as opposed to the vehicle-side view).
Recommended analysis workflow
A structured approach:
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Start with the Map view to get a spatial overview of the day’s routes.
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Switch to By vehicle to inspect individual vehicle schedules and detect overruns or misplaced breaks.
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Use By visit to confirm all visits are assigned and within their time windows.
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Use these insights to inform strategic decisions and test different scenarios.
Next
The visualizations help you understand the what of a routing plan, which is a first step to understanding the why and the so what.
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For guidance on how to validate and explain optimized plans, see the Validating an optimized plan with Explainable AI guide. This guide explains why trust and explainability matter when presenting a plan to planners and stakeholders. How to check correctness, understand trade-offs, and communicate why certain assignments were made. It shows how visualizations, real-world metrics, and explainability features work together to build confidence in a schedule rather than treating it as a black box.
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For a broader view on diagnosing and resolving operational bottlenecks, the Uncovering inefficiencies in operational planning guide provides useful context. It discusses common sources of planning inefficiencies (such as under- or over-utilization, skill mix issues, and demand imbalances) and how planning optimization can help you pinpoint structural problems in your workforce plan.