Load planning

Load planning is the step between booking and dispatch: deciding how cargo fits onto trips.

Load types

• FTL — one customer, one truck, direct. Planning is trivial: assign the shipment to a trip.
• LTL — multiple customers per truck. Planning involves consolidating legs that share a route on the same day.
• Container drayage — move a 20ft / 40ft container between a port / ramp and a yard or customer. One container per trip (chassis-dependent).
• Parcel / multi-stop — many small stops per trip. Usually optimised by a route planner.

Capacity checks

Every vehicle has weight, volume, and pallet capacity. When you attach a leg to a trip, the platform runs capacity checks:

• Sum of legs' weight ≤ vehicle payload.
• Sum of legs' volume ≤ vehicle capacity.
• Sum of legs' pallet slots ≤ vehicle pallet positions.

Over-capacity attachments are blocked with a clear message; the dispatcher picks a different trip or splits the cargo.

Compatibility checks

• Temperature — reefer cargo can't ride on a dry truck; ambient-only cargo can ride a reefer if the unit's off.
• Hazmat — class + UN-number compatibility rules from ADR table; incompatible classes can't share a trip.
• Food-grade — food-grade cargo can't share with non-food-grade in the same compartment.
• Stackability — non-stackable cargo allocates full pallet positions.

Incompatibilities are blocked at attachment time. Override requires ROAD_ADMIN + reason (audited).

Multi-drop routing

For multi-stop trips, the driver app's route is an ordered list of stops. Order them manually or use Optimise route to minimise total drive time. Optimisation considers:

• Planned arrival windows per stop.
• Driver hours-of-service limits.
• Traffic-based ETAs (if the tenant has a traffic provider integrated).

Optimisation is a suggestion — the dispatcher can override.

Container drayage specifics

Drayage uses two extra records: container (size, type, seal, weight) and chassis (if chassis is separate from tractor). Empty-leg and empty-return movements can be tracked as separate legs on the same shipment.

Planning at the booking-enquiry stage

If cargo doesn't fit any single vehicle, you can request a multi-vehicle quote at booking time — the quote engine splits the cargo across vehicles of the requested type and totals the cost. See quotation-road.