Glossary of terms

The lexicon is only an indicator as each company and region has its own expressions and usages. The terms and concepts may therefore vary, but as a general rule, the above terminology is agreed upon.

Hitchhiking

When a car enters a given zone, the system tells it which zone it is in. This car is then said to be hooked.

Serving

A service is the zone(s)/station(s) that serves the first zone where the customer is located (see this illustration). Example, a call for a customer residing at 352 Boulevard de la Concorde in Montreal wants a cab, the system looks for a car in the zone where the customer is located, in this case it is the zone 97. If the system does not find cars in the customer's zone, then it will search in subsequent zones which are called the services; in this case the services are zone 96, zone 95, zone 93 and zone 94.

No load

A no load (a blank trip) is a call distributed to a driver, but the customer has not boarded the car after the driver has waited the prescribed time in front of the address. Generally, this time is 5 minutes, after which the dispatcher places the driver first in the departure area by Protecting the vehicle) or in the destination area.

Penalty

A penalty given to a driver is usually due to an action that is considered wrong by a company, but tolerated to some extent. A driver may be penalized for refusing a call, rescheduling a call, going out of service, or allowing seconds to elapse on a new call (auto-resume).

Restriction

A restriction is the refusal of a driver (or owner) to make a certain type of call. For example, a customer has a cat with him, a driver can refuse to pick up a customer with a cat. In this case, the company adds a driver-level restriction in the Driver Folder and the automatic system will skip over that driver if the operator checked the "Chat" box during the Call Pickup.

Example of car-level restrictions: since a driver can work on three cars, it could be that an owner refuses cats in his car, but the driver accepts cats, so the system will jump over that car.

The system first looks at the restrictions of the vehicle, then at the restrictions of the driver. This is why the system sometimes jumps over a vehicle or a driver, because it does not "qualify" for a call.

Street sections

Fraxion's database of streets in a region (street zoning), is subdivided into street sections. For example, Boulevard de la Concorde in Lavaltrie is divided as follows: 121 to 241 (odd), 140 to 190 (even), etc. (see this illustration). There are several reasons why the database is built this way. First, if a customer or dispatcher tries to enter an address that does not exist (e.g. 243 Boulevard de la Concorde) the system will block the dispatcher from continuing to enter the call. Then, each street section is associated with a geographic coordinate (latitude, longitude) to use the functionality of detecting the car closest to the address. So if the database contained 1 to 9999 Boulevard de la Concorde (even and odd), not only would all the street number errors pass through the system, but the nearest car detection would be impossible.

Protected vehicle

A protected vehicle in a zone is an action performed by a dispatcher that forces the system to keep a vehicle in a zone without the vehicle actually being there.

Vertice

feminine word Plural: Vertices

In computer science, it is the vertex (or vertices) of any object.

Example: "The point where two (2) lines meet in street zoning is called a vertice"

Example: "A Windows window has four (4) vertices"