How zone avoidance affects navigation

Routing around restricted zones

When a vehicle needs to reach a stop, its turn-by-turn navigation engine (powered by OpenRouteService) knows about your restricted zones and calculates a path that goes around the zone. From the operator's perspective:

• The route to the stop avoids the restricted zone.
• If the stop can't be routed to at all (e.g., it's boxed in by a restricted zone), the map draws a dashed straight-line to it instead of a road route.
• The vehicle's navigation app shows the detour automatically — no operator choice needed.

Stops that can't be routed to

If you draw a restricted zone that completely surrounds a stop and there's no road outside the zone that leads to it, the routing engine can't build a road path. Instead of failing, the operator's map falls back to a dashed straight line pointing at the stop. Nothing is flagged "unreachable" — but a dashed line is a sign the zone boundary may be drawn too large. Check the boundary and shrink it if needed.

Warning zones show orange paths

For warning zones, the route does not change — but the map highlights any path segment crossing the warning zone in orange to alert the operator that they're about to enter a caution area.

What zones do NOT yet do

Important: Zones currently affect only turn-by-turn navigation (the routing overlay on the map). They do not yet:

• Change the swarm's scoring or work-assignment decisions.
• Prioritize stops inside or outside zones differently.
• Block a vehicle from claiming a stop.

That is Layer 2 functionality, planned for a future release. For now, zones are a navigation aid.