Freight chains

A freight chain is one vehicle executing an ordered sequence of shipments as a single route. It is the central decision unit in TOVR: pricing, compliance, and procurement all attach to the chain, not to individual loads. This is the concrete form of the platform thesis that a load's value is determined by the chain around it.

Loaded legs and deadhead legs

A chain is decomposed into legs, which alternate between two kinds:

• Loaded leg — the truck is carrying a shipment's cargo. It earns revenue and incurs cost.
• Deadhead leg — the truck repositions empty between loads (or to the first pickup). It earns no revenue but still burns fuel, tolls, driver hours, and vignettes.

A typical chain looks like: deadhead → loaded → deadhead → loaded → …. The insight the chain model captures — and that per-load pricing misses — is that deadhead is pure cost. A high-rate load reached by 300 empty kilometres can be worth less than a modest load with no repositioning. Optimizing a chain is largely about minimizing deadhead relative to revenue.

What a chain carries

Each chain records everything needed to decide whether to run it:

• The route — the ordered shipments, the countries traversed, and the per-leg breakdown.
• The economics — a full profit-and-loss: fuel, toll, driver, vignette, and border cost per leg, revenue on loaded legs, and derived metrics (profit, margin, profit per km, revenue per km, empty percentage). How these are computed is owned by the Cost engine.
• The compliance verdict — cabotage status and driver-schedule feasibility. Owned by Compliance.
• The market position — where the chain's price sits against the lane's market percentiles, feeding the bid recommendation.
• A vehicle — a chain is priced for a specific vehicle, because cost depends on that vehicle's specs and that carrier's rate tables. The same route has a different P&L for a different truck.

How chains come to exist

Chains are produced automatically, then acted on by a dispatcher:

1. Match — spatial and temporal candidates are found between free vehicles and open shipments (see the domain model).
2. Build and price — candidate routes are assembled into chains, priced by the cost engine, and checked for compliance. Legal, profitable chains are surfaced as proposals.
3. Triage and act — the dispatcher reviews proposed chains on the Freight Chains page or in the Schedule's offer pool, then pursues the good ones through procurement.
4. Execute and reconcile — once won, the chain is executed and its actual outcome can be compared against the estimate.

Extending a chain

A chain is rarely final. Adding one more compatible load onto the end of a route — filling an otherwise-empty return leg — is often the single biggest lever on profit per truck-day. This is the extend step of the platform loop, and it is why chains, not loads, are the unit of optimization.

What a chain is not

• It is not a booking. A chain is a costed, compliant plan; the carrier still has to win the freight through procurement.
• It is not vehicle-agnostic. Re-pricing the same route for a different vehicle produces a different chain, because cost is carrier- and vehicle-specific.