Orbit Plan: What Are Virtual Vehicles?
Virtual vehicles are placeholder vehicles used inside Orbit Plan. They let you plan tours before a specific carrier, vehicle, or driver has been chosen, and they give the planner a safety net when your selected fleet is not large enough to cover every shipment.
What is a virtual vehicle?
A virtual vehicle is not a real truck in your fleet. It is a placeholder the planner uses to represent capacity that could move a set of shipments. A virtual vehicle behaves like a real one during planning — it has dimensions, capacity, extras, and working hours — but it is not linked to a specific carrier, vehicle, or driver.
Once planning is finished, any tour that sits on a virtual vehicle can be reassigned to a real carrier, vehicle, and driver before it is dispatched. The route, stops, and schedule stay unchanged — only the executing party is filled in.
The two kinds of virtual vehicles
You will come across virtual vehicles in two situations inside Orbit Plan.
Virtual vehicles you add yourself. Open Add vehicles → Virtual vehicles and add a placeholder based on one of your saved vehicle classes. This is useful when you want to plan the routes first and decide later which carrier or subcontractor will execute them — for example when preparing tours to offer on the spot market, or when you want a fully planned day ready before your morning carrier briefing. Virtual vehicles can also be part of a saved Fleet Template.
Virtual vehicles the planner adds automatically. If the fleet you selected cannot cover every shipment under the given constraints — capacity limits, time windows, working hour regulations — Orbit Plan may add extra virtual vehicles on top of your selection so that a feasible plan can still be produced. These are marked with a small copy icon on the resulting tour card.
A tour planned on an automatically added virtual vehicle is Orbit Plan telling you: your selected fleet was not enough here, and you would need additional capacity, a subcontractor, or a second shift to cover this workload.
Controlling what the planner may do
The Allow additional virtual vehicles switch under Cost Priorities in the planner options controls whether the planner may add placeholders beyond the fleet you selected.
On — the planner may add extra virtual vehicles if your fleet is insufficient. You always get a plan, even when capacity is tight.
Off — the planner may only use the vehicles you explicitly added. Shipments that do not fit on those vehicles will appear as unplanned instead.
The default behaviour depends on the planning profile you have selected. The default cost-optimised profile allows additional virtual vehicles, so that Orbit Plan can always return a plan even when capacity is tight. Stricter profiles disallow them, so that the plan reflects your real fleet exactly.
Example
Lucía, a dispatcher in Madrid, is preparing tomorrow's 42 pallet deliveries across Spain and southern France. She does not yet know which carriers will be available, so she opens Orbit Plan, loads the day's shipments, and under Add vehicles → Virtual vehicles she adds four Standard 7.5 t placeholders from her vehicle class list.
She starts the optimisation and receives four feasible tours. Because demand is higher than usual, Orbit Plan also adds a fifth automatic virtual vehicle — shown with a copy icon — to cover the overflow. Lucía reads this as a clear signal that she needs either an extra subcontractor or a second driver shift.
She offers the first four tours to her preferred carriers. Once each carrier accepts, she assigns the real vehicle and driver to the tour, and the plan goes live in Orbit Dispatch and Orbit Cockpit.
Frequently asked questions
Why would a tour be planned on a virtual vehicle?
Either because you deliberately added a placeholder before picking a carrier, or because Orbit Plan needed extra capacity to produce a feasible plan with your current fleet.
How do I recognise a virtual vehicle in the results?
Virtual vehicles appear on a tour card without a specific carrier or vehicle attached. Virtual vehicles the planner added automatically carry an additional copy-icon badge with the tooltip "This virtual vehicle has been added automatically during optimisation."
Does a virtual vehicle cost anything in the plan?
Yes. Using a virtual vehicle carries an internal penalty cost, so the planner only chooses one when it is actually the better option — for example when your real fleet is full, or when a second run of an existing vehicle would be significantly cheaper than adding another real one. The penalty is tuned by the active planning profile.
How do I stop the planner from adding its own virtual vehicles?
Turn off Allow additional virtual vehicles under Cost Priorities in the planner options. From that point on, only the vehicles you explicitly added will be used, and any shipment that does not fit will appear as unplanned.
Can I replace a virtual vehicle with a real vehicle after planning?
Yes. Once a tour has been produced, you can assign a real carrier, vehicle, and driver to it before dispatching. The stops, schedule, and route are preserved.
What is the difference between a vehicle class and a virtual vehicle?
A vehicle class is a reusable template — a definition of a kind of vehicle, such as a 40 t articulated lorry or a 3.5 t van. A virtual vehicle is an instance created from that template for a single planning run. You can add several virtual vehicles from the same vehicle class to plan several parallel tours.
Can I save a mix of virtual and real vehicles for reuse?
Yes. The Fleet Template feature lets you save any combination of real and virtual vehicles and load them into future planning runs with one click.
When should I use virtual vehicles instead of real ones?
Use virtual vehicles when you want to plan capacity before committing to a carrier (for example when tendering tours on the spot market), when you want to explore "what if" scenarios with different fleet sizes, or when you rely on subcontractors that you assign only after the plan is finalised.