Coach and driver scheduling without overlaps

Planning coaches and drivers means assigning to each confirmed service a coach and a driver who are free at that time, and knowing at every moment which services still have neither. The underlying rule is simple: a coach or a driver cannot be on two services at once. The hard part is applying it when there are pending quotes, multi-day services and last-minute changes.

Here is what should block a resource and what should not, how to treat services with no time or no return, what is missing before a service counts as planned, and the limit worth being clear about: Bus Center does not calculate driving times.

The rule: nobody on two services at once

A coach or a driver cannot be on two services at once. In Bus Center it is a rule the program enforces: if you try to assign a coach that is already on another service at that time, it rejects it and tells you which service it is on: “The vehicle is already assigned to the service” (our translation of the on-screen message), with its number, “at that time”.

The check is the same wherever the change is made from: when creating a service, or changing its time, coach or driver. And if two people in the office assign the same coach at once, the program handles one request after the other, so they cannot both end up with the same slot. Assignments on different coaches do not get in each other's way.

Last-minute changes have one more consequence. If you change the coach or driver on a service that already has its route sheet issued, the sheet no longer matches the service: Bus Center detects it and warns you to issue a new version. We explain it in how to modify a route sheet that has already been issued.

What blocks and what does not

What is confirmed blocks; what is only quoted does not. Quoting three weddings on the same Saturday is possible: only the confirmed one blocks. A quote or a cancelled service reserves nothing.

In season, several requests can arrive for the same day: you quote them all and confirm the one the customer accepts. If every quote blocked the coach, you would have to decide before knowing who confirms. How each quote is prepared is covered in the coach quote.

Services with no time, no return or lasting several days

To know whether two services overlap you need an interval: departure date and time, and how long it lasts. Bus Center treats it like this:

Case	How Bus Center treats it
Service with no departure date or time	Not checked: without an interval you cannot say there is an overlap.
Service with no return time	Taken as occupying the resource until the end of its last day.
Return earlier than departure	The service is understood to cross midnight.
One service ends at 14:00 and another starts at 14:00	They do not overlap: the bus is already free.
Multi-day service	Occupies from the departure on the first day to the return on the last.

The first case is the one most worth watching: a service with no time warns of nothing. Entering the time as soon as it is known is what makes the check work.

Services with no coach or no driver

A confirmed service with no coach or no driver is a problem that has not blown up yet. It is worth seeing them all together every day, sorted by date, and resolving them in order.

In Bus Center, for a service to count as planned it needs a coach, a driver and a departure time; if any is missing, the program does not let it through and says what is missing, for example “The driver still has to be assigned.” (our translation of the on-screen message). And to move to “ready to depart”, if the service needs a route sheet, it must have been issued. The driver sees on their phone portal their services with time, origin, destination and coach; a quote does not appear, because they see only services confirmed with the customer.

Which coach and which driver go on each service, and what remains free, is what the planning without overlaps (in Spanish) section on the home page summarises.

Before assigning: documents and rest periods

A coach being free does not mean it can leave. Before assigning it, two more things are worth checking.

The first is documents. A coach whose ITV (Spanish roadworthiness inspection) or insurance is about to expire, or a driver whose CAP (driver certificate of professional competence) or tachograph card is expiring, appear in the Bus Center expiry dashboard, which gathers what expires in 30 days or less. We explain it in expiry date tracking.

The second is the driver's rest periods. A driver having no other service at that time does not guarantee they can drive: it depends on how much they have driven and rested beforehand. That is set by driving and rest times, which we explain in driving and rest times on buses.

A good moment to check both is when confirming the service, not the day before: if there is no driver with rest periods in order or no coach with documents up to date, there is still time to find another.

What Bus Center does not do

Bus Center does not calculate driving or rest times and does not detect infringements: it checks that the driver is not on two services at once, not that they have rested enough. Nor does it read tachograph files, optimise routes or track coaches by GPS. That part of planning remains the traffic manager's job, with their tachograph tools.