Concepts & Glossary

This page is the shared vocabulary used across all three pillars. Each term below has a one-line definition here; where a term has a deeper home, the link points to the page that owns the full explanation. When in doubt, this glossary is the tie-breaker.

Freight domain

Shipment — the atomic unit of freight demand: one consignment to move from an origin to a destination, usually sourced from a freight exchange. A shipment carries stops, contents, a rate, and a status. Owned by TOVR › Domain model.

Load — a richer, normalized view of cargo (line items, handling units, order references, involved parties) associated with a shipment. Where a shipment is the lightweight demand root, a load is its structured cargo detail.

Shipper — the company that posted the load; the demand-side counterparty. A dispatcher negotiates with the shipper's contacts to win freight.

Carrier — the trucking company (the customer). A carrier owns vehicles and drivers. TOVR is carrier-facing.

Freight chain — an ordered sequence of shipments a single vehicle executes as one route, modeled as alternating legs. The central decision unit in TOVR. Owned by TOVR › Freight chains.

Leg — one segment of a chain. A loaded leg carries revenue-bearing cargo; a deadhead leg is an empty reposition with cost but no revenue.

Deadhead — empty running between loads. Pure cost, no revenue — the thing that separates a profitable chain from an unprofitable one.

Location — a geocoded place (origin, destination, or where a truck is free). Stored as a geographic point; there are no separate latitude/longitude fields.

Economics

Cost engine — the component that computes a chain's real per-leg profit-and-loss from fuel, tolls, driver, vignettes, and border crossings, using a carrier's own rate tables. Owned by TOVR › Cost engine.

€/km (per-kilometre rate) — freight rates and costs are normalized to euros per kilometre so lanes of different lengths can be compared.

p25 / median / p75 — the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile of observed market prices for a lane. APEX's core output. Owned by APEX › Overview.

Corridor — a directed origin→destination lane that APEX aggregates price observations into. The reverse direction is a separate corridor.

Observation — a single recorded freight price (spot or executed) that APEX ingests and normalizes into a corridor.

Bid recommendation — the price TOVR suggests a carrier bid: a cost-derived floor positioned against APEX's market percentiles. Owned by TOVR › Bid recommendation.

Commission — TOVR's monetization: a fee charged only on freight the carrier actually executes (confirms a win on). Owned by TOVR › Procurement & outreach.

Bidding & procurement

Direct offer — a bid made directly to a shipper (or their contact) for a load.

Exchange bid — a bid submitted onto a freight exchange (e.g. Transporeon) through TOVR. Some exchanges are publish-only by platform design.

Confirm-win — the moment a carrier confirms it won a load, which records the association and triggers commission billing.

Compliance

Cabotage — the EU limit on how much domestic haulage a foreign-registered truck may do after an international delivery (broadly: up to 3 operations within 7 days, then a cooling-off period). Evaluated per-vehicle across a whole chain. Owned by TOVR › Compliance.

Hours-of-service (HOS) — EU driving-time rules (Regulation 561) that cap daily/weekly driving and mandate rest. A chain must be schedulable within HOS to be feasible.

Platform & tenancy

Org (organization / tenant) — the account boundary. Every user belongs to one or more orgs; freight, fleet, and settings are scoped to an org. (An older company_vat-keyed model is legacy; org is the live tenant anchor.)

Surface — a channel fOS operates through: web chat, voice calls, and MCP for external assistants. Owned by fOS › Surfaces.

Tool — a single capability fOS can invoke (e.g. search_available_loads, get_chain_economics, confirm_win). Owned by fOS › Tool arsenal.