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.

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Foundations

Frames the platform is built on.

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

Autonomic Logistics OS: A continuous, self-running operating system for logistics that holds the operation at homeostasis the way the autonomic nervous system holds the body. Operators set the outcomes; the OS pursues them across every fleet, carrier, and network in scope. The category Nash defines.
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.

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.
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

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; Promise sets the ETA and Orchestration fulfills it.

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.
Memory: The learning substrate. Provider scores update, routing improves, promise accuracy tightens with every outcome. Skills turn operational know-how into reusable playbooks.

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: AI-powered provider selection per delivery. Balances cost, reliability, speed, fairshare, and contractual constraints — replacing static rules with a model that compounds.
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.

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.

Explore the platform