What is a zone?

A zone is a representation of a geographical region in which mobility tasks will be performed. A zone contains information about locations, vehicles, and trips within a region. Each zone is independently optimized and they do not share information with each other.

What is a zone used for?

Zones are the framework for the grouping of vehicles, trips, locations, and drivers as a single unit. For instance, the zone is typically a city, place, or specific region where the last-mile delivery operations will take place. Additional zones can be created to represent different geographical areas or other regional groupings of a mobility business. Each zone is optimized separately, and the elements in one zone are not shared with other zones.

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Tip: Each zone is independent

A zone does not share anything with other zones. Since vehicles and locations only exist in a single zone, each trip will be fulfilled in that same zone. (For sharing between zones, see Connect Overview)

Zone optimizations are run in parallel. When the areas serviced by a business are broken down into zones (independent regions), the optimization time to create solutions is quicker. The optimizations for each zone are performed in parallel on multiple servers, instead of an entire business using a single server to calculate routes.

The zone is a shared representation of the mobility business between a client and the Interplai web service. The client will need to update the zone with locations, vehicles, and trips for optimization solutions to be generated.

Example

A zone may be a city, town, county, territory, or any other type of grouped area. Optimizations are quicker with smaller areas, so while a state or country is also a geographical region, it is not always the best choice to use that large of an area. This applies to very populated cities as well; for example, New York City may be best optimized when broken into the boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.

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Key takeaways:

• A zone represents some geographical region.
• Elements in one zone are not shared with other zones.
• Each zone is optimized separately.