Operations

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.

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

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