Spiral technical overview
Spiral is a dynamic scheduling engine for field-force operations — a new-to-market product built on 30 years of experience, tested on operations with up to 10,000+ work items and 5,000+ concurrent resources, and deployed today with the UK’s largest vehicle breakdown operator. This page covers how it works; for the business view see the Spiral overview.
What Spiral handles
Section titled “What Spiral handles”Field operations are constantly disrupted. Spiral re-optimises in real time around emergency work, overrunning activities, vehicle failures, sickness and traffic impacts — across many industries, including vehicle breakdown and recovery, building maintenance, telecommunication network maintenance, blue-light emergency response and utility operations.
What is Spiral?
Section titled “What is Spiral?”Spiral acts as a plugin for your existing field-force systems, delivering improved efficiency, better customer service and low implementation cost. It models the business problem and generates solutions for complex scenarios — coordinating multiple resources, meeting emergency time windows and optimising for cost. Spiral automates every scheduling decision, calculating the correct solution the large majority of the time.
The business model
Section titled “The business model”- Resources — field personnel / vehicles scheduled to service projects through defined stops (activities).
- Projects — collections of stops that fulfil an objective, e.g. a plant repair or a multi-engineer service visit.
- Topography — the movement routes between stops, integrable with external routing engines such as Google Maps and OSRM.
Stop behaviour — appointments, parts lead times, assets, costs and quality gates — is configured via stopParams; resources and contracts via resourceParams and the roster / duty model.
Integration
Section titled “Integration”Spiral is a single executable that communicates via JSON streams (input / output / diagnostic). It integrates with legacy systems either as an automated operator or via direct database coupling, and supports scenario replay for development, tuning and maintenance — the same engine runs live or as a simulation, and can be restarted at any time with a new configuration.
- Documentation — streams, workflow and the full object reference.
- Helix Workforce Management — the complete product built on Spiral.