Glossary

The vocabulary of modern logistics.

A reference to the building blocks of the Nash platform: agents, dispatch, the context fabric beneath them, and the execution networks they coordinate. Definitions written for operators, engineers, and product teams who need precise language for an imprecise industry.

121 terms 12 sections

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Foundations

Frames the platform is built on.

The conceptual lexicon. Read this first if Nash is new vocabulary.

Autonomic Logistics: A continuous, self-running system for logistics that holds the operation at homeostasis the way the autonomic nervous system holds the body. Operators set the outcomes; the system pursues them across every fleet, carrier, and network in scope. The category Nash defines. Distinct from the F-35's Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS): Nash applies the autonomic principle to commercial delivery and fulfillment, not aircraft maintenance.
Autonomic Intelligence: A class of software that pursues complex, high-level objectives with minimal oversight, adapts to changing conditions, learns from outcomes, and operates inside the guardrails its operators set. Agentic describes how decisions are made (episodic). Autonomic describes how systems operate (continuous).
Equilibrium in Motion: Nash's stance on logistics. There is no static optimum: stores close, weather changes, providers exit markets, demand shifts. Equilibrium has to be found, then continuously refound. The platform runs the operation at that moving point.
Logistics Singularity: The widening gap between what customers want (instantaneous, perfect, free) and what most networks can actually deliver. Closing it by hand doesn't scale. Closing it with software that reasons about the whole system end to end does.
Physical AI: Autonomous trucks, drones, robots, and the long tail of yet-uninvented delivery modalities. Nash treats them as first-class participants in the logistics graph: dispatched, monitored, and optimized alongside human drivers.
Nash Equilibrium: A solution concept in non-cooperative game theory, formulated by John Forbes Nash Jr. in 1950 and recognized with the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. A Nash equilibrium is a set of strategies in a multi-player game where no player can improve their outcome by unilaterally changing strategy, assuming every other player holds theirs fixed. The configuration is foundational to modern economics, biology, network design, and AI. The platform takes its name from the concept: logistics is exactly this kind of multi-player game, and Nash's job is to find and hold the equilibrium point across shippers, carriers, fleets, and customers.

Behaviors

Self-running properties.

The four continuous behaviors of an autonomic system. Each one shows up across every layer below.

Self-configuring: Nash absorbs the specific shape of a business's operations (its networks, providers, fleets, SLAs, exceptions) and adapts to that reality. The operation never bends to fit the software.
Self-healing: Nash detects when something has broken, diagnoses what failed, and resolves it before a human has to notice.
Self-optimizing: Nash continuously tunes against the outcomes a business has committed to, recalculating as conditions, costs, and capacity shift.
Self-protecting: Nash anticipates failures that haven't happened yet, holds promises through volatility, and preserves the operation under stress.

Actors

Who's in the game.

The humans and entities with stakes in every delivery. Nash is named for game theory; these are the players.

Shipper: The company sending the goods. Customer of a 3PL or carrier; originator of the order, owner of the SLA, payer for the move. Same role is often called the "merchant" in retail and e-commerce flavor and "shipper" in freight and logistics flavor.
Merchant: A seller who fulfills orders for end customers. The retail, e-commerce, and restaurant flavor of "shipper." Lives at the intersection of inventory, brand, and customer experience.
Brand: The consumer-facing identity that owns the relationship with the buyer. Different from the seller and different from the carrier: a brand is what the customer thinks they bought from, regardless of who picked, packed, or drove the delivery. Nash treats brand surfaces (tracking pages, notifications) as merchant-controlled, not carrier-controlled.
Customer: The end recipient of the delivery. The person at the door, the curbside spot, the office desk. The party whose experience determines repeat purchase, NPS, and the rest of the post-purchase economics.
Operator: Nash's word for the human running the dispatch console. Could be a retail operations lead, a restaurant manager, a fleet supervisor, a 3PL ops director. The person who sets the rules the platform optimizes against and intervenes when an exception fires.
Dispatcher: The operator role focused on the live assignment loop: deciding which driver or carrier handles which job, re-routing on the fly, resolving exceptions in real time. Sometimes a dedicated person, sometimes a hat the operator wears.
Driver: The human (or autonomous unit) that physically moves the order. Picks up, navigates, delivers, captures POD. The other side of every dispatch decision.
Commerce: The broader system of buying and selling that logistics serves. Online, in-store, marketplace, social, conversational, and agent-mediated buying all run on physical fulfillment underneath. Logistics is the substrate beneath all of them.

Geography

Distance bands.

The four legs of a delivery, named by the geography they cover.

First Meter: The pickup leg: store, restaurant, warehouse, or hub. Where the delivery actually starts, before any handoff. Nash uses "First Meter" rather than "first mile" because the pickup point is rarely a mile away from anything; it's usually meters.
Middle Mile: The transfer leg between operating points: DC to store, hub to hub, terminal to terminal. Bigger vehicles, fewer stops, tighter time windows.
Last Mile: The final delivery leg, from a fulfillment point to the customer's door. The most expensive, most variable, and most customer-visible leg in any logistics chain.
Last Yard: The final feet of the delivery: building entry, floor, doorstep, locker, age check. Where a successful drop becomes a failed one if the operation hasn't planned for it.
Line-haul: The long-distance leg between two operating points: terminal to terminal, warehouse to warehouse. The high-volume middle of a freight move, distinct from the local pickup and delivery legs at either end.
Final Mile: The last leg of a delivery to the recipient, used interchangeably with last mile. More common in freight and big-and-bulky, where the final leg often needs scheduling, two-person handling, or installation.
Hub: A consolidation point where orders are sorted and transferred between vehicles or legs. The pivot of a hub-and-spoke network, where middle-mile line-haul meets last-mile routes.

Capacity

Capacity types.

The kinds of operators Nash dispatches against, in plain English.

Carrier: Any entity that physically moves freight or parcels. National parcel carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS), regional carriers, specialist carriers. Distinct from a 3PL, which manages logistics on top of carrier capacity.
Multi-carrier: Running deliveries across several carriers at once rather than one default, choosing per order by cost, reliability, and coverage. The foundation of a resilient last-mile network, and what dynamic dispatch selects across.
Multi-modal: Running deliveries across more than one mode at once, drones, ground couriers, internal fleets, sidewalk robots, choosing per order by what the order and real-time conditions call for. What autonomous-first delivery becomes at scale: no single mode wins every order, so the network holds several at once.
Courier: A single driver or small operator running point-to-point or on-demand deliveries. Often local; often gig.
3PL: Third-Party Logistics provider. A company contracted to run all or part of another business's logistics: warehousing, fulfillment, transportation, sometimes returns. Sits between a shipper and the carriers.
DSP: Delivery Service Partner. The contracted last-mile operator model made famous by Amazon: independent businesses that run branded vehicles and drivers exclusively for one shipper.
Gig courier: An independent driver dispatched per delivery through a marketplace (Uber, Roadie, Senpex, others). On-demand capacity that flexes with demand without taking on payroll.
Vehicles: The physical units a delivery rides in: vans, trucks, e-bikes, motorcycles, drones, autonomous pods. In Nash, every vehicle is a tracked asset with capacity (cubes, weight, temperature class) and constraints (cold chain, regulated cargo, restricted zones) the dispatch engine reads against every job.
Crowdsourced delivery: Fulfilling deliveries with independent, non-dedicated drivers summoned on demand rather than a fixed roster. Capacity that flexes with the day, which Nash ranks alongside internal fleet and contracted carriers as one pool.
Hybrid fleet: A delivery operation that draws on internal drivers, contracted carriers, and gig couriers together rather than choosing one. The value is not owning several channels; it is treating them as a single capacity pool so each order routes to whatever best fits its promise. Orchestration is what makes a hybrid fleet act as one.

Operations

Operations vocabulary.

The day-to-day language of running a logistics network.

Order: The customer-facing unit of demand. One purchase, one promise, one tracking link. An order may consume one job or many depending on how it's split.
Quote: The price-and-ETA exchange between Nash and a provider. Nash sends pickup, dropoff, dimensions, and time window; the provider returns cost, ETA, and any constraints. Dynamic dispatch compares quotes across the provider network and picks the winner. Quote latency, the round-trip time of that exchange, is a leverage point for high-volume operations.
Delivery: The full path from origin to destination. The unit of work the platform exists to coordinate. Made up of one or more jobs, depending on whether the order is split, transferred, or returned along the way.
Job: The dispatch unit. The thing a driver actually executes: pickup A, drop B. One order can produce multiple jobs (split shipment, return, exchange) and one job can serve multiple orders (batched delivery).
Stop: A single location on a route. Pickup or dropoff. Most last-mile routes are sequenced lists of stops.
Route: The ordered list of stops a driver runs in a single trip, with the path between them. Route optimization is the search problem of finding the best one given current constraints.
Wave: A batch of orders released to dispatch together, usually on a clock (every 5 minutes, every hour). Smooths out demand and lets the dispatcher optimize across orders rather than one at a time.
Manifest: The driver's load list for a route: what's on the truck, in what order, going where. The source of truth for a tour.
Drop: A single delivery completion. The driver hands the package off and POD closes the order. Most last-mile teams measure first-attempt drop rate, the share of orders successfully delivered on the first try.
POD: Proof of Delivery. The artifact (photo, signature, geolocation, notes) captured at the doorstep that proves the drop happened. Increasingly verified by AI rather than by human review.
ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival. The single most-checked field in any delivery operation. Quality of an ETA is a function of how live the data underneath it is.
SLA: Service-Level Agreement. The contracted performance threshold: on-time rate, delivery window, refund triggers. The thing operators are graded against.
Order promising: Committing a delivery date or window to a customer at the moment of purchase. Classic order promising asks what inventory allows: available-to-promise checks stock, capable-to-promise checks whether supply can be made in time. A live operation also asks what capacity allows, checking real fleet and carrier availability before the commitment is made rather than validating it afterward. A promise made without capacity behind it is a forecast.
Cross-dock: A facility where inbound freight is unloaded and reloaded onto outbound vehicles directly, without sitting in storage. Used to consolidate or reshuffle loads in transit.
BOPIS: Buy Online, Pickup In Store. The retail order pattern where a customer buys online and collects in person. On the operations side, it consumes pick-and-pack labor at the store rather than carrier capacity.
TMS: Transportation Management System. The system of record for shipments and freight movements. Older TMS platforms model shipments; Nash sits above them and orchestrates the live decisions a TMS records after the fact.
OMS: Order Management System. The system of record for what was ordered, from where, and against which inventory (Manhattan, Fluent, Shopify, NetSuite). An OMS decides which store, warehouse, or node sources an order; orchestration decides how it physically reaches the customer once sourced. The two meet at the promise: the OMS commits a date, dispatch is what keeps it.
WMS: Warehouse Management System. The system of record inside the four walls: receiving, put-away, inventory locations, picking, packing. A WMS knows a parcel is ready to leave the building. It does not decide who carries it, when it goes, or what happens when that carrier fails. Nash reads the ready signal and takes the order from there.
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning. The system of record for finances, inventory, procurement, and HR at a larger business (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics). Logistics decisions Nash makes show up in the ERP as completed transactions; the ERP rarely makes them.
SaaS: Software as a Service. Software delivered over the internet, paid for by subscription, updated continuously by the vendor. The default operating model for modern business software, including Nash. Distinguished from on-premise software, which customers install and maintain themselves.
HITL: Human-in-the-loop. A system design where automation handles the routine and a human is pulled in for exceptions, overrides, or high-stakes judgment calls. Nash dispatches autonomously by default but surfaces exceptions to the dispatcher for review. Compare with fully autonomous and human-out-of-the-loop designs.
SOP: Standard Operating Procedure. The documented step-by-step process for a recurring operational task: how to handle a returns pickup, what to do when a driver no-shows, how to verify a controlled-substance delivery. SOPs are the institutional memory of an operation; in Nash, agents and workflows can encode them as reusable playbooks.
OTIF: On-Time In-Full. The performance KPI that combines two delivery requirements: the order arrives on schedule (on-time) AND with every requested SKU in the requested quantity (in-full). A miss on either dimension fails OTIF. The standard B2B and grocery scoring metric; harsher than on-time-rate alone.
NPS: Net Promoter Score. The most-cited customer-loyalty metric: ask "how likely are you to recommend us, 0-10?", count promoters (9-10) minus detractors (0-6), express as a number from -100 to +100. In delivery, NPS moves with promise accuracy, on-time rates, and how well the brand owns the post-purchase moment.
Manual Intervention: Any action a human takes in the dispatch loop that automation didn't make on its own: re-routing a stuck order, calling a driver, escalating an exception, manually reassigning capacity. Manual-intervention rate is a closely-watched KPI for autonomic systems; the goal is for it to drop toward zero as the system learns the operation.
Delivery success rate: The share of orders that complete on the first attempt, on time, with valid POD, and without exception. The cleanest single metric for whether dispatch is working. Above 99% is best-in-class; most operations sit lower.
Delivery costs: The all-in cost to move one delivery from origin to destination, including labor, fuel, vehicle, packaging, exception-handling overhead, and any per-job carrier fee. The denominator behind every cost-per-stop and cost-per-order target. Compresses with route density, batching, and carrier mix.
Route optimization: Computing the best sequence and assignment of stops across a fleet against live constraints: time windows, vehicle capacity, cost, and traffic. Solved once at plan time it decays by mid-morning, so Nash re-solves it continuously as the day changes.
Continuous re-optimization: Re-solving the plan as the day unfolds instead of freezing it at dispatch. A cancelled order, a late driver, or a new pickup reshapes the affected routes in place, so the plan tracks reality rather than the morning's assumptions.
Geofencing: A virtual boundary drawn around a place. Crossing it fires an event: arrival at a stop, entry to a zone, a status change, a customer notification. The trigger that turns raw location into an operational signal.
Delivery exception: Any deviation from the planned delivery: a missed window, a failed attempt, a wrong address, a damaged item, a refused order. The events an autonomic system is built to catch, diagnose, and resolve before a human has to notice.
WISMO: Short for where is my order, the support contact a customer makes when they cannot see their delivery. High WISMO volume is a symptom of poor visibility and loose promises; accurate tracking and tight ETAs are how Nash drives it down.
Branded tracking: The live order-tracking page a recipient sees, carrying the merchant's brand and voice rather than the carrier's. Keeps the last, most anxious stretch of the purchase inside one experience the merchant controls.
Cost per delivery: The unit metric: total delivery spend divided by orders delivered. Where delivery costs name the components, cost per delivery is the single number an operator watches, and the one Nash drives down when you set margin as the objective.
Telematics: The stream of location, speed, fuel, and diagnostic data a connected vehicle emits. The raw signal underneath fleet visibility, safety scoring, and utilization, and an input Nash reads when it dispatches and re-routes an internal fleet.
Reverse logistics: Everything that moves backward through the network: returns, exchanges, recalls, failed deliveries, and reusable-asset recovery. The half of logistics most operations bolt on last, and the half where cost and customer trust quietly leak.

Industries

Industry vocabulary.

Terms specific to the verticals Nash runs: grocery, restaurants, retail, pharmacy, distribution, field services, freight.

Cold chain: Grocery, pharma, restaurants. Temperature-controlled storage and transit for perishables and pharmaceuticals. A break in the chain (a 30-minute warm window during a handoff) damages the product, breaks the SLA, and in regulated categories, breaks the law.
Pick-and-pack: Grocery, retail, 3PL. The warehouse step where humans (or robots) pull individual items from inventory and assemble them into the order. The first leg of fulfillment, before anything moves outside the building.
Hyperbatching: Grocery. Routing many orders together with smart sequencing to maximize delivery density without breaking promise windows. Where simple batching pairs two orders, hyperbatching weighs cost, capacity, time-to-door, and SLA risk across many orders at once.
Curbside: Retail, grocery. Customer collection at the store entrance without going inside. The handoff happens in the parking lot, from store associate to driver. Cousin of BOPIS with a shorter dwell.
Ship-from-store: Retail. Using a retail store's existing inventory as a fulfillment node for online orders. Turns excess store stock into same-day delivery capacity and shortens the last-mile leg from a regional DC to the customer.
Chain of custody: Pharma, healthcare, age-restricted goods. Documented, signed-off handoffs that prove a controlled item moved through verified hands at every step. Required for prescriptions, lab samples, alcohol, tobacco, and high-value freight.
Lane: Transportation & Logistics. A recurring origin-to-destination route in freight. Carriers price and contract by lane (e.g., LA to Chicago); the same lane can carry very different rates depending on direction, season, and current capacity.
Backhaul: Transportation & Logistics. The return leg of a freight trip, ideally with cargo. Filling backhauls is the most direct way to kill empty miles and turn a one-way route into a round-trip economic.
Empty miles: Transportation & Logistics. Distance driven without cargo. The single biggest source of preventable cost waste in trucking. Industry average runs 15-25%; the right dispatch logic compresses it.
Service window: Field services, B2B. The scheduled arrival window a customer is given (e.g., between 1pm and 3pm Tuesday). The narrower the window, the more pressure on dispatch precision and the more painful a missed slot.
Multi-marketplace: Restaurants. A merchant taking orders from several third-party delivery channels simultaneously alongside their own first-party flow. Each channel has its own SLA shape and dispatch logic; Nash absorbs the chaos into one orchestration plane the kitchen actually sees.
Catering: Restaurants. Scheduled-in-advance, large-format orders for events, offices, and gatherings. Different SLA shape than on-demand: less time-critical at fulfillment, more time-critical on the drop, often with setup and serving requirements at delivery.
POS: Restaurants, retail. Point of Sale. The system that captures the customer's order at the moment of purchase (Toast and Square in restaurants; Lightspeed and Shopify POS in retail; NCR in supermarkets). Nash integrates at the POS so a delivery is created the instant the order is rung up.
Substitution: Grocery. When a SKU is unavailable at pick time and the picker swaps in a customer-approved alternative. Substitution rate is a real KPI; high rates cost satisfaction and refund margin.
Click-and-collect: Grocery, retail. The British and European cousin of BOPIS: customer buys online, collects in-store. Same operational shape with regional naming differences.
LTL: Transportation & Logistics. Less-than-truckload freight. Shipments too small to fill a trailer alone, consolidated with other shippers' loads. Different pricing model, different SLA shape, different routing logic than full truckload.
Pallet: Distribution, B2B. The standard wholesale shipping unit, typically wood, 48 by 40 inches in North America. Quantities, weights, and routing are usually expressed in pallets, not parcels.
Dwell time: Transportation & Logistics. The time a driver spends waiting at a pickup or drop-off facility, beyond the scheduled appointment. Drivers earn detention pay after a threshold; shippers absorb the cost. Reducing dwell is one of the largest cost levers in freight.
OS&D: Transportation & Logistics. Over, Short & Damaged. The reporting category for shipment discrepancies: arrived with extra units (over), missing units (short), or visible damage (damaged). Triggers claims and adjustment workflows.
Same-day / Next-day: Commerce SLA tiers. Same-day promises delivery within hours of order; next-day promises by end of the following business day. Different cost structures, different network designs, different customer expectations.
White-label: Platforms. Operating a service under a customer's brand instead of Nash's. The customer's tracking page, notifications, and driver app all show the customer's logo and colors. Nash powers the orchestration; the customer owns the customer-facing surface.
Structured fulfillment data: Retail, platforms. Delivery options, windows, costs, and status exposed as machine-readable API responses rather than prose on a shipping page. AI shopping agents compare merchants programmatically before a person ever sees a storefront, so an operation that cannot return a real quote and a real window when an agent asks gets scored as slow by default. Nash serves quotes, windows, and tracking over MCP and A2A.
Dark store: A retail location that fulfills online orders only, closed to walk-in shoppers. Laid out for speed of pick and dispatch rather than browsing, and a common node behind fast local delivery.
Micro-fulfillment: Small, often automated fulfillment nodes placed close to demand so the final leg stays short. A structural bet that proximity beats warehouse scale for fast delivery.
Quick commerce: Retail promised in tens of minutes, not days. The operating model behind instant grocery and convenience, where the delivery network is the product rather than a cost of doing business.

Layer 01

Interfaces

How operators, drivers, customers, and other agents reach Nash.

Operations Portal: The Nash dashboard. Dispatcher command center, analytics, configuration, exception management.
Fleet App: Driver-facing iOS and Android. Accept assignments, navigate, capture proof of delivery.
Customer Surfaces: Branded tracking pages, notifications, and feedback. Your customer sees your brand, not the carrier's.
Ask Nash: Conversational operator interface. Natural-language analytics, operations queries, task automation.
MCP & A2A: Model Context Protocol (inbound) and Agent-to-Agent (peer). Third-party AI agents can create deliveries, read status, and coordinate with Nash agents across system boundaries.
Agentic Commerce: Conversational storefront. End consumers browse and buy in natural language rather than clicking through a catalog, and AI agents can complete purchases on their behalf. Promise sets the ETA at the moment of intent and Orchestration fulfills it, so the delivery commitment holds from the first message to the doorstep.

Layer 02

Agentic Intelligence

The AI substrate that decides, learns, and acts on goals you set.

Workflows: Order-level routing logic. Decides which dispatch strategy applies, which modules are invoked, what happens when conditions change.
Agents: Autonomous actors that pursue goals you set, e.g. "keep SLA above 95%" or "re-dispatch any order unaccepted after 4 minutes." Pre-built or operator-configured.
Agentic AI: AI that decides and acts on its own within defined guardrails, not just recommends. In logistics, an agentic system evaluates conditions and executes, rerouting a load or resolving an exception, rather than surfacing a suggestion for a person to approve. Agentic describes how a decision gets made; autonomic describes a system that runs continuously. Nash is autonomic, and agentic action is one mechanism inside it.
Memory: The learning substrate. Provider scores update, routing improves, promise accuracy tightens with every outcome. Skills turn operational know-how into reusable playbooks.
Operational alerting: The signal an operator gets the moment something needs attention: a delivery running late, a provider that just canceled, an ETA sliding past its window. Nash's agents raise it against live context and route it to whoever can act, so problems surface before a customer notices.
Automatic failover: When a delivery breaks, the reassignment that happens without a person. A provider cancels or a driver goes dark; Nash detects it, scores the alternatives, and moves the order to the next best option before the promise is at risk. Self-healing, applied to one order in flight.

Layer 03

Logistics Intelligence

Planning, dispatch, and the carriers that execute.

Intelligent Planning: Route optimization, capacity-managed delivery windows, continuous re-optimization, scenario simulators.
Dynamic Dispatch: Choosing the delivery provider per order rather than by a fixed rule. Nash scores every option on cost, reliability, speed, fairshare, and contractual constraints, assigns the one that best fits the promise, and sharpens the scoring as outcomes feed back. The decisioning core of Intelligent Orchestration.
Delivery orchestration: Coordinating a delivery across every fulfillment option, internal fleet, contracted carriers, gig couriers, and store labor, as one capacity pool, so each order goes to the resource that best fits its promise. The single point of integration between demand and fulfillment. Nash's Intelligent Orchestration. Route optimization solves one route; orchestration is the layer above it, deciding which capacity runs the route at all.
Provider Network: One integration to 500+ providers: national couriers, regional carriers, gig networks, last-mile operators, plus your owned fleet, all under one dispatch strategy.
Live Operations: Dispatcher command center, deliveries dashboard, exception management, real-time webhooks.
Fleet: Drivers, installers, pick & pack, vehicles, drones, and autonomous units, all first-class capacity.
Exception management: Catching the routes and deliveries that break from plan and resolving them before they cost the operation. Rather than watch every order with equal weight, an operator manages by exception: the late pickup, the failed drop, the promise about to slip. Nash surfaces each with the context to act, resolves the routine ones on its own, and escalates only the few that need a person.

Layer 04

CX Intelligence

The promise made to customers, kept end-to-end.

Promise: Delivery windows, ETA accuracy, dynamic pricing, backed by live fleet capacity.
Tracking & Notifications: Branded tracking pages, status updates, AI proof-of-delivery validation, feedback capture.
Post-Purchase: Returns, refunds, issue resolution, running on the same substrate as the original dispatch.

Layer 05

Context Fabric

The shared substrate of signals beneath every decision.

Demand Signals: What your customers need: orders, commerce connectors, bulk operations, active promises, returns and pickups.
Network Signals: What your capacity can do: fleet and provider data, carrier contracts, SLAs, dispatch configs, warehouse inventory, TMS / WMS feeds.
Reality Signals: What's happening on the road right now: live signals, traffic, weather, exceptions, delays, customer profiles.
Learning Signals: What Nash learned from every delivery before: reliability trends, traffic patterns, seasonality, cost benchmarks, cross-network intelligence.

See the layers in motion.

Every term above is a real surface inside Nash, wired into one continuous loop of decisioning, execution, and capacity.

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