Introduction to ICS
The Intelligent Contractor Selection (ICS) feature is a powerful optimization engine that automates the assignment of Contractors to Routes based on real-time and historical data.
ICS is designed to help logistics operations reduce transport costs, minimize deviations from plan, lower emissions, and fulfill contractor commitments — all without manual intervention.
By intelligently pairing routes with the most suitable contractors, ICS enables seamless logistics execution while balancing key business priorities such as cost, performance, sustainability, and fairness. It integrates with external systems and works autonomously — no planner approval is required before assignments are made.
Why Should I Use the ICS?
ICS addresses critical needs for both Planners and Contractors, making operations more efficient, transparent, and aligned with business objectives.
For Planners
ICS aligns assignments with your Organization's needs, allowing you to select and customize what good looks like for you:
Cost Reduction
One of the most effective ways to drive down the cost of logistics and the risks associated to your last mile operations is to rely on multiple Contractors. This setup is also the most complex to manage manually due to the increase of dependencies.
Operational Efficiency
Automates the entire contractor selection and assignment process in real time, reducing manual workload and Planner decision fatigue.Planning Accuracy
Helps ensuring alignment to forecasted demand and committed assignments to your contractors, helping reduce missed commitments.Quality and Reliability
Leverages performance data to favor high-performing contractors, ensuring more consistent service delivery.
For Contractors
Incentive-Based Assignment
High-performing contractors are rewarded with more routes, encouraging sustained service quality.Fair Distribution
ICS ensures that contractors who are underutilized relative to their monthly guarantees are prioritized.
ICS supports a collaborative, performance-driven ecosystem where all parties benefit from transparency and data-informed decisions.
Prerequisites to Using the ICS
1. One or More Connections Configured
ICS can only assign routes to Contractors that are set up as Connections in your Mover environment. A Connection links your organization with an external contractor, enabling route sharing, execution tracking, and performance-based assignments.
2. Reservations Created
Contractor availability must be represented in the system through Reservations, which define when and how many routes a contractor can handle. ICS uses these reservations to ensure assignments match actual capacity.
3. Routes Created via Route Optimization
ICS only works on routes that have been generated through the Route Optimization engine. Approving the Route Plans acts as a trigger for the ICS, as it ensures that all Routes are created, and the optimization can start.
Once these elements are in place, you’re ready to define ICS rules and run optimizations.
Create the ICS Rule Sets
To create a new rule set, find the Contractor Selection section in the TMS, and navigate to the Rule Sets area.
From there, click on "New rule set".
The Rule Set page is made by different sections, each with its specific purpose:
General: define the name, and whether the approval of the result is manual or automatic
Run schedule: define when the ICS has to run
Optimization: define what should the ICS optimize for, selecting among 7 presets, or finding a customized balanced between 7 optimization parameters
Contractor pricing: define the individual price of one or more of your connections (optional)
Reservation assignment boundaries: define which criteria should be respected when choosing a Reservation
Preferred contractors: define if any of the Contractors' capacity have to be saturated first by the algorithm (optional)
General
Define a name for your ICS rule set
Define if the ICS result should be automatically assigned (i.e. Routes will automatically be assigned to Reservations and Contractors) or if you want to review it first, and manually select which assignment to approve
When should the ICS run?
The ICS is triggered by a Route Planning job being approved. When you approve the Route Plan (either automatically, or manually), the ICS job is launched, and will produce the assignment plan to the Reservations.
In the dropdown you can specify which Route Planning Rule Set should, when they are used to generate a route plan, trigger the ICS run with the present settings
What should the ICS optimize for?
There are 7 variables the ICS can consider:
Price
CO2 emission
Guaranteed utilization
Contractor Rating
Historical performance
Forecast promise
Fairness
You can either select from the drop down one of the presets:
Electric vehicle utilization: Prioritizes the assignment of the routes to reservations of electric vehicles.
Lowest price: Optimizes the assignment of the Route to Contractors having the lowest monetary cost (defined below)
Contractor rating: Prioritize the contractors you assigned the highest performance rating.
The rating can be customized in the Connection Details
Forecast promise: The automation will aim at living up to the Contractors' expectations in terms of promised routes volumes.
Reach out to Mover to set up a forecasting tool, or to share your forecasts, so that they can be included in the ICS runs
Best contractors' performance: Optimize route assignments to contractors with the highest performance in term of on time deliveries.
Fulfill promised guarantees: Prioritize route assignments to meet the contractual obligations in terms of guaranteed amounts with contractors.
This can be shared to Mover via API (both the monthly target, and the current level), and will be displayed next in the Connection Details
Fair allocation: Distribute routes evenly among the available contractors.
Or you can select custom settings, and manually edit the weight of each one of the above mentioned variables, to produce an optimal plan, based on what is relevant for your organization.
What is the pricing for contractors?
Here you can define and customize the price per hour and price per km for each of your contractor, so that the ICS can take these data in input to compute the lowest price for the Reservations utilization.
Add a new contractor
Define the price per hour
Define the price per km
Add a higher price for all the Contractors not defined
How should routes be assigned to Reservations?
Customize the assignment logic, by defining:
Which Reservations should be considered based on their tags:
"Reservations must have at least one of these tags" will make sure that all Reservations which have at least one of the tags defined will be considered by the ICS
"Reservations must have all of these tags" will make sure that all of the Reservations which have all of the tags defined will be considered by the ICS
How many Routes can a Reservation have: this is in case your routes are on average shorter, and a Resource might be utilized for more than a route per day. Here you can define how much.
Which contractors should be preferred?
This configuration allows you to saturate first the capacity of the preferred contractors, in order.
Select "Add preferred contractor"
Select the contractor
Repeat, until your preferred Contractors have been selected
Then re-rank them by using the up/down arrows next to each contractor.
Contractors can have the same priority: if two contractors have the same priority, they will be utilized equally.
Assignment logic
When assigning routes, each route will be assigned to the highest priority contractor in this list, that has a reservation where the route will fit, without overlapping other routes.
If none of the contractors listed here have a reservation where the route will fit, your other contractors will be considered, with equal priority.
If a route can be assigned to multiple contractors with the same priority, the assignment will be based on which contractor best satisfies the optimization goal.
Run and approve an ICS Job
Once your Route Plan gets approved, an ICS job will be launched, and will appear in status "Processing" after some time.
When the job is completed, it will change status to "Done". At that point, you'll be able to open the details and check the results.
Explore the Jobs list
In the list of jobs you can have a quick summary of:
How many Reservations got used
How many Reservations were unused
How many Routes got assigned, and how many did not
How many Route assignment to a Reservation have been approved yet
When the job was created
Explore the Job details
The job details page is organized in three tabs:
Result
Metrics
Rule set used
Result
In the Result tab, is organized in 3 sub-sections, showing:
Summarized statistics about:
the used Reservations
the assigned Routes
the approval status of the assignment
2. Unassigned Routes
the list of the Routs which were not assigned, so that you can take care of them manually.
Clicking on each one, will open the Route Details, and from there you can select Assign > Assign to a Reservation
3. Assigned Routes
Shows the details of all the Reservations included in the ICS job in a timeline view
For each reservation also includes the detail of the Route assigned to it.
If the Route is represented in color lilac, and has dotted lines, it means it has not ben approved yet. If the Route is in blue, with continuous line identifying its boundary, it has already been approved.
You can easily filter the timelines view to only return a subset of result, matching:
Reservation Reference
Contractor
Route Slug
Or you can select only the Reservations containing Routes not yet approved.
You can also increase or decrease the zoom level.
Metrics
The metrics page shows a recap of the optimization variables, together with the relative weight defined in the rule set:
Carbon emission
Price
Performance
Guarantee utilization
Priority category
Fairness
Rule set used
The third tab shows you the detail of the Rule Set that has been used to obtain the ICS result, making sure you can always explain the result you obtained.
Approve the ICS job
If you have selected the option to manually approve the ICS job, you will still have to do this last step before concluding the assignment process.
If the job has already been approved, your job is done.
Unlike the Route Plans, in the ICS it is possible to approve all the assignments or just some.
You only have to select the Reservations you want to approve, by clicking on the checkbox next to each one
Or select all of them with the checkbox in the header row
And proceed to approve the selected reservations with the button in the top right part of the screen
As soon as a Route is assigned to a Reservation, if no Contractor has been previously assigned (i.e. make sure you do not have any Auto Contractor assignment rules or any other ICS job), the Reservation's Contractor will be automatically assigned to the Route
The Routes you decide not to approve will not be assigned to any Reservation, and therefore not assigned to any Contractor.
Conclusion
ICS represents a leap forward in last-mile logistics optimization. By automating contractor assignments based on utilization, cost, performance, and sustainability, ICS empowers planners to focus on strategic work while ensuring that operations stay efficient, fair, and reliable.
Whether your goal is to reduce costs, meet service-level agreements, or support sustainable logistics, ICS is the intelligent and scalable solution to help you get there.