The following terms are important to understand the whole use case.
| Appointment | A sequence of tasks, scheduled to be executed respecting a specific time slot. |
| Break | A scheduled pause in a driver's or vehicle's operation, typically for rest, refueling, or maintenance. |
| Category | A property that enables applying constraints to entities categorized as such. |
| Compactness | Refers to how closely stops are grouped on a route to minimize overall distance. |
| Compartment | A designated section of a vehicle that is used to organize, secure, and transport different types of cargo. |
| Constraint | Serves to restrict or guide the optimization to meet specified requirements or limitations. |
| Costs | A route has a certain cost, which can be configured per vehicle. The total cost of all routes serves as a minimization goal for the optimization. |
| Depot | A warehouse where orders to pick up (resp. deliver) can be delivered to (resp. picked up from). |
| Last-in-first-out | A loading strategy where orders are unloaded in the opposite sequence as they were loaded, often abbreviated as LIFO. |
| Load | Dimensions such as weight, volume or pallets of an order or a vehicle. |
| Location | A geographical location with additional properties such as time slots. |
| Order | A request to transport goods. |
| Outsourcing cost | The additional expense in the event that the optimization does not incorporate an order into a route. |
| Preference | A prioritized need or requirement in the optimization process, allowing certain factors to be favored, even at the cost of higher expenses. |
| Route | A sequence of scheduled tasks, assigned to a vehicle. |
| Routing profile | Information necessary to calculate driving durations and distances. |
| Rule | Serves to conditionally modify properties of entities based on their relation to other entities. |
| Stop | A scheduled location visit to pick up or deliver goods. |
| Stop concurrency | Refers to the ability to handle multiple stops at the same time |
| Task | Either the pickup or delivery action of an order. |
| Time slot | A restriction when tasks are allowed to be executed at a certain location. |
| Traffic mode | A description of the traffic situation considered when calculating driving durations. |
| Vehicle | A vehicle to transport goods containing vehicle-specific and driver attributes. |
| Vehicle slot | A designated space at a location for a vehicle to park or unload, with concurrent stops requiring separate slots. |