Under the hood
There's no route to build
Snowmass replaces hand-built routes with live dispatch. Here's what actually happens during a storm — and what's running underneath.
During the storm
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1
Drop your properties once
Place your properties on a map — or import a whole book of business from a CSV. That's the setup. There are no routes to draw, no per-operator lists to click together, and nothing to rebuild when the season changes.
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2
Every property is scored live
As tractors move, Snowmass continuously scores each open property for the whole fleet — weighing each machine's position, the real road travel time to the property, and the direction you've chosen to sweep. Each property is scored the moment a machine needs its next stop — driven by live GPS and completed stops — so an assignment always reflects where the fleet is right now.
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3
Each tractor claims its best next stop
The best-positioned machine atomically claims a property — settled in the database in a single step so two tractors can never double-book a property. The fleet fans out across the perimeter on the opening move, then sweeps dense blocks before moving on, without a dispatcher grouping stops by hand.
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4
When a plan breaks, the swarm heals
A machine goes silent, stalls, or gets recalled for a breakdown — and its properties are released back to the swarm automatically within minutes, picked up by whoever's now best placed. The moments a static route falls apart are the moments Snowmass absorbs on its own.
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5
Plow-ridge recheck closes the loop
When a crew clears a property but the road plow re-buries the entrance, the operator flags it — and Snowmass holds the property through a cooldown, then re-queues it so the swarm sends someone back. The re-accumulation a static list can't even express is handled for you.
Under the hood
What makes the swarm feel intelligent
The scoring — position, road time, and direction
Every few seconds, each open property gets a live score for every available tractor. Three things drive it, and none of them is a route you drew in advance.
- Position: how well-placed a machine is relative to the property and the block it sits in — so tight clusters get swept together.
- Real road travel time: actual drive time over the road network from a live routing engine, never a straight-line guess that ignores a river or a highway.
- Direction: your chosen sweep — outside-in, inside-out, or nearest-first — so the whole storm flows the way you want it to.
The atomic claim — why two machines never double-book
Scoring decides who should take a property; the claim makes it real without a race. When a tractor takes a property, that claim is settled in the database in a single atomic operation.
- Two machines reaching for the same property in the same instant is resolved cleanly — exactly one wins, the other simply scores its next-best stop.
- No dispatcher arbitration, no double dispatch, no two crews arriving at one property to find each other already there.
- Because claiming is race-free at the database, the fleet can re-optimize continuously without ever stepping on itself.
The behaviors that keep coverage smart
A raw "nearest available" rule would scatter a fleet and waste minutes between stops. A handful of production behaviors shape the swarm into something that covers ground the way an experienced dispatcher would.
- Start-spread fan-out sends the opening moves wide across the perimeter instead of piling onto one block.
- Density cohesion keeps a machine sweeping a dense block to completion before it leaves — no ping-ponging across town.
- Anti-steal keeps a machine from grabbing a property right next to a peer already working that block, so crews don't overlap.
How it heals when reality diverges
The whole point of a swarm is what happens when the plan breaks. Snowmass treats failure as normal and routes around it without a human re-planning the storm.
- A machine that goes silent past its window has its claimed properties released back to the swarm automatically — a breakdown or dead battery doesn't strand a route.
- A dispatcher can recall a broken-down machine on purpose, and its work flows straight back to the fleet.
- Wedged claims — where one deployment ends up holding a property it can't finish — are detected and healed so work never quietly stalls.
Only possible because there's a real engine underneath
Live ETAs, what-if simulation, self-healing, plow-ridge recheck — none of these are features you could bolt onto a static route. They exist because dispatch is a living system, re-deciding the storm every few seconds. That engine is the whole product.
Ready before the next storm
Run a simulation scaled to your fleet, or talk to the team about the season.