Operations

Stop

A single location on a route. Pickup or dropoff. Most last-mile routes are sequenced lists of stops.

Where this fits

The day-to-day vocabulary of running deliveries. Routes, waves, drops, manifests, ETAs, SLAs. These are the units operators reason in, and the inputs every downstream model needs.

Related terms

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).
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.
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.
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.
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.