Compliance

A freight chain must be legal before it is profitable. TOVR checks three things — EU cabotage limits, driver hours-of-service, and equipment/route legality — as a hard gate. Cabotage is evaluated per vehicle across the whole chain.

Before a freight chain's economics matter at all, it must be legal and schedulable. Compliance is a hard gate, not a warning: an illegal chain is never surfaced as an option, however profitable it looks. This is the first of the platform's two gates — legal, then commercial. This page is the single home for how TOVR reasons about freight legality.

Cabotage

Cabotage is domestic haulage performed by a foreign-registered truck inside another EU country. EU rules limit it to prevent a truck from effectively operating permanently in a market that is not its home. TOVR encodes the EU Mobility Package limits:

After an international delivery into a host country, a truck may perform a bounded number of cabotage operations — broadly up to 3 operations within 7 days.
After that window, a cooling-off period applies before the truck may do cabotage in that same country again.
Deadhead (empty) legs are not cabotage operations.

The essential point: cabotage is per-vehicle and cross-chain. Whether a given leg is legal depends on that specific truck's recent international deliveries and its home country, tracked forward across the entire chain. Two identical routes can have different cabotage verdicts depending on where each truck has just been. TOVR records a chain's cabotage status — compliant, warning, or violation — with the details behind it.

Driver hours-of-service

EU driving-time rules (Regulation 561) cap how long a driver may drive per day and per week and mandate rest and breaks. A chain is only feasible if it can be scheduled within those limits — including realistic loading/unloading time and any required rest. Driver hours come from telematics where available, so the check reflects the driver's actual remaining hours, not an assumption. A chain that cannot be driven legally is infeasible regardless of its P&L.

Equipment and route legality

A chain must also be physically and legally runnable by the assigned vehicle:

Equipment fit — ADR certification for hazardous goods, temperature control where required, and axle/weight limits for the load.
Route restrictions — weekend and holiday HGV bans in the countries traversed, and time windows on pickups and deliveries.

These constraints are part of feasibility: a chain is built and priced only for a vehicle that can legally and physically run it.

How compliance relates to cost

The cost engine runs feasibility checks (cabotage, hours, weekend bans, time windows) before economics are consulted. Only chains that pass every gate are surfaced with a P&L and a bid recommendation. This ordering — legality first — is a core platform principle.

Reputation

Compliance is about legality; reputation is about reliability. TOVR also tracks carrier and shipper reviews and partner statistics, which inform who a dispatcher chooses to work with. That reputation model has its own page under TOVR › Concepts.