Scheduling and Routing Glossary · Field Operations

Arrival window: the span the customer is told to expect the technician in, stored as local time plus the property's time zone (Booking Appointments).
Backlog, job pool: occurrences whose window has opened (or passed) with no booked visit; FieldRoutes' Job Pool is the familiar form (Recurring Schedules).
Capacity: how much work a territory, crew or shift can take in a period, counted in minutes, slots or jobs (Territories & Capacity).
Effective dating: recording when a fact becomes true and stops being true (valid_during), so changes can be scheduled and history stays true (Effective Dating & History).
Freeze window, freezing: the part of a plan before a point in time that re-optimization may not change (Route Optimization).
Generation model: how recurring work is created: a rolling horizon of real work, placeholders booked later, the next visit on completion of the last, rules per asset, or allowances (Recurring Schedules).
Hard and soft constraints: rules a plan must satisfy, versus preferences it is penalized for breaking (Route Optimization).
Held visit: a visit in held, a slot reserved with an expiry while a booking completes; a hold that lapses ends cancelled with reason expired. Not the same as an agreement on hold (Booking Appointments).
Idempotency key: a client-supplied key stored with a request's result, so a retried booking or charge returns the first result instead of creating a second (Booking Appointments).
Lexicographic objective, weighted sum: two ways to fold routing goals into one objective: ranked levels, where a lower level only breaks ties, or one scale on which any term can be traded for another (Weighing the Routing Objective).
Make-up: a visit owed for an occurrence that was missed or not completed (Recurring Schedules).
Objective profile: the versioned weights (labor, mileage, lateness, skipped work, fairness) that tell an optimizer what a better route means (Weighing the Routing Objective).
Occurrence: one promised instance of a recurring service, with its own due window: upcoming, open, booked, completed, skipped or missed (Recurring Schedules).
Operating hours, shift: when a territory or resource can be booked; shifts are regular, on call or time off (Territories & Capacity).
Optimistic concurrency: committing an optimizer's plan only if the visits it read haven't changed since its snapshot, checked by a row version (Route Optimization).
Pinning: fixing one visit so the optimizer leaves it (is_locked), or fixing its technician (pinned_resource_id) (Route Optimization).
Recurrence: an agreement's schedule rule (recurrences): an RRULE plus the window, anchor, minimum gap, season and holiday policy (Recurring Schedules).
Recurrence rule (RRULE): the iCalendar (RFC 5545) format for a repeating schedule (Time & Date Formats).
Resource: what the scheduler books (resources), of kind technician (pointing at a staff member), crew, contractor or equipment; vehicles are their own table (The Core Data Model; crews and shifts are in Territories & Capacity).
Route: one resource's ordered visits for a day (Route Optimization).
Schedule anchor, completion anchor: whether the next due date counts from the rule's start (a late visit doesn't move the next) or from the last completed visit (lateness compounds) (Recurring Schedules).
Scheduling policy: an ordered set of work rules and weighted objectives a scheduler applies, as Salesforce Field Service names it (Booking Appointments).
Service territory: the area, usually an effective-dated polygon, a branch or team covers (Territories & Capacity).
Service window: the span a recurring visit may happen in and still count as on time (Recurring Schedules).
Status reason (visit): the one catalog behind not_completed and cancelled visits: no_access, not_home, customer_declined, part_needed, weather, unsafe_condition, technician_unavailable, customer_asked, address_not_found, id_check_failed, item_damaged, and expired for a lapsed hold. Work performed on site makes a visit completed instead (The Core Data Model).
Travel matrix: drive times and distances between every pair of stops, from a routing engine such as OSRM, Valhalla or a hosted API (Route Optimization).
Visit: a scheduled time plus an assignment that performs a work order (visits): held, scheduled, dispatched, en route, on site, completed, not completed or cancelled (The Field Operations Business).
VRP, VRPTW (vehicle routing problem, with time windows): assigning and ordering stops across vehicles, under time windows in the second form, solved by tools such as OR-Tools, VROOM or Timefold (Route Optimization).
Work rules: the pass-or-fail rules in a scheduling policy, as Salesforce names them, beside its weighted service objectives (Route Optimization).
Work type: a vendor template for a kind of work that sets its duration and required skills; the volume's service type plays that role (Platform Architecture).

Arrival window: the span the customer is told to expect the technician in, stored as local time plus the property's time zone (Booking Appointments).
Backlog, job pool: occurrences whose window has opened (or passed) with no booked visit; FieldRoutes' Job Pool is the familiar form (Recurring Schedules).
Capacity: how much work a territory, crew or shift can take in a period, counted in minutes, slots or jobs (Territories & Capacity).
Effective dating: recording when a fact becomes true and stops being true (valid_during), so changes can be scheduled and history stays true (Effective Dating & History).
Freeze window, freezing: the part of a plan before a point in time that re-optimization may not change (Route Optimization).
Generation model: how recurring work is created: a rolling horizon of real work, placeholders booked later, the next visit on completion of the last, rules per asset, or allowances (Recurring Schedules).
Hard and soft constraints: rules a plan must satisfy, versus preferences it is penalized for breaking (Route Optimization).
Held visit: a visit in held, a slot reserved with an expiry while a booking completes; a hold that lapses ends cancelled with reason expired. Not the same as an agreement on hold (Booking Appointments).
Idempotency key: a client-supplied key stored with a request's result, so a retried booking or charge returns the first result instead of creating a second (Booking Appointments).
Lexicographic objective, weighted sum: two ways to fold routing goals into one objective: ranked levels, where a lower level only breaks ties, or one scale on which any term can be traded for another (Weighing the Routing Objective).
Make-up: a visit owed for an occurrence that was missed or not completed (Recurring Schedules).
Objective profile: the versioned weights (labor, mileage, lateness, skipped work, fairness) that tell an optimizer what a better route means (Weighing the Routing Objective).
Occurrence: one promised instance of a recurring service, with its own due window: upcoming, open, booked, completed, skipped or missed (Recurring Schedules).
Operating hours, shift: when a territory or resource can be booked; shifts are regular, on call or time off (Territories & Capacity).
Optimistic concurrency: committing an optimizer's plan only if the visits it read haven't changed since its snapshot, checked by a row version (Route Optimization).
Pinning: fixing one visit so the optimizer leaves it (is_locked), or fixing its technician (pinned_resource_id) (Route Optimization).
Recurrence: an agreement's schedule rule (recurrences): an RRULE plus the window, anchor, minimum gap, season and holiday policy (Recurring Schedules).
Recurrence rule (RRULE): the iCalendar (RFC 5545) format for a repeating schedule (Time & Date Formats).
Resource: what the scheduler books (resources), of kind technician (pointing at a staff member), crew, contractor or equipment; vehicles are their own table (The Core Data Model; crews and shifts are in Territories & Capacity).
Route: one resource's ordered visits for a day (Route Optimization).
Schedule anchor, completion anchor: whether the next due date counts from the rule's start (a late visit doesn't move the next) or from the last completed visit (lateness compounds) (Recurring Schedules).
Scheduling policy: an ordered set of work rules and weighted objectives a scheduler applies, as Salesforce Field Service names it (Booking Appointments).
Service territory: the area, usually an effective-dated polygon, a branch or team covers (Territories & Capacity).
Service window: the span a recurring visit may happen in and still count as on time (Recurring Schedules).
Status reason (visit): the one catalog behind not_completed and cancelled visits: no_access, not_home, customer_declined, part_needed, weather, unsafe_condition, technician_unavailable, customer_asked, address_not_found, id_check_failed, item_damaged, and expired for a lapsed hold. Work performed on site makes a visit completed instead (The Core Data Model).
Travel matrix: drive times and distances between every pair of stops, from a routing engine such as OSRM, Valhalla or a hosted API (Route Optimization).
Visit: a scheduled time plus an assignment that performs a work order (visits): held, scheduled, dispatched, en route, on site, completed, not completed or cancelled (The Field Operations Business).
VRP, VRPTW (vehicle routing problem, with time windows): assigning and ordering stops across vehicles, under time windows in the second form, solved by tools such as OR-Tools, VROOM or Timefold (Route Optimization).
Work rules: the pass-or-fail rules in a scheduling policy, as Salesforce names them, beside its weighted service objectives (Route Optimization).
Work type: a vendor template for a kind of work that sets its duration and required skills; the volume's service type plays that role (Platform Architecture).