Load plan

The Load plan panel in the manifest detail pane answers the question a loader on a dock actually has: where does each thing go?

That is a different question from the capacity bar on a unit card. Capacity answers how much room does this consume; cube answers does it fit by volume; the load plan answers where. It is the first thing dispatch produces that somebody acts on physically, and that changes what it is allowed to do when it does not know something.

The rule

⛔ An item with no recorded dimension is unplaced and named, never assumed.

Almost all freight in the system is a standard pallet footprint, so “it is probably the usual pallet” would be right most of the time — which is exactly what makes it dangerous. A plan that substitutes the usual pallet looks identical to a real one, is wrong for the rows that differ, and gives nobody a way to tell which. So every item is either placed at a position derived entirely from recorded figures, or it appears in the unplaced list with the reason it could not be.

The unplaced list is inside the same panel as the drawing, permanently. It cannot be collapsed, tabbed away or scrolled off, and the count is repeated in the detail pane’s header where scrolling cannot hide it.

Reading the drawing

Plan is a top-down view of the deck with a side elevation under it. 3D is an isometric view of the same load. Drag it to turn it freely, or use the controls on the drawing itself: a viewpoint picker for the common angles, four nudge buttons for fine turns, and reset to return to the canonical angle — which matters because a printed runsheet is only reproducible if there is an angle to come back to.

The colours dropdown offers Default, High contrast, Monochrome and Colour by connote. Hue never carries meaning on its own: anything the colours tell you is also written down somewhere on the panel.

Compartments, not one box

A unit’s compartments are its components in order. A B-double is two decks with two mass limits, and packing it as one 22-metre box would place freight across the gap between two trailers while showing a confident-looking total. Each compartment is packed independently and carries its own weight ledger.

Deck size comes from the component’s own measured figures first, then its vehicle type’s deck figures, and then nothing — an unmeasured deck produces no plan rather than a guessed one. In particular the regulatory height limit is never read as a deck height: 4300mm is the overall legal vehicle height from the road including the prime mover, and usable internal load height is nearer 2.4–3.0m. Planning to the legal envelope would produce loads about 40% taller than the trailer can accept, drawn as a correct-looking picture.

Why something is unplaced

Reason	What to do about it
No item dimensions	The package has no recorded L×W×H. Add them on the booking.
No deck geometry	Nobody has recorded the deck size for this vehicle or component. Fleet → transport configuration.
Exceeds compartment	It genuinely does not fit in any compartment on this unit.
Weight exceeded	It fits by size but would put the compartment over its mass limit.
Weight unknown	No weight recorded, so it cannot be added to a weight ledger.
Stack not recorded	Nobody said whether it may be stacked. Treated as un-stackable.
Stack refused	Somebody said it may not be stacked, and there is no floor space left.
DG segregation	It cannot share a deck with what is already on it — see below.
Not palletised	The item is not in a form this packer places.

Reasons are grouped by cause, so “2 have no recorded dimensions” and “1 needs a bigger deck” are two different problems on the screen rather than one list of eight rows.

Stackability

The Stack field on each freight row on the booking form drives this. It has three meaningfully different states:

• Blank — nobody asked. Dispatch treats it as un-stackable, which is the safe answer, and says so.
• No — an operator established that this freight may not be stacked. A different fact from “blank”, and recorded as one.
• 2 / 3 / 4 high — how many may be stacked in total. The height is the half that does the work; “stackable” on its own cannot be computed with.

Dangerous goods on a deck

The packer separates dangerous goods from non-dangerous freight and refuses to place two different DG classes together. That rule is crude and always safe: it can only ever refuse a combination the ADG Code would have permitted.

A segregation matrix exists to replace it with the real compatibility rules, and it currently ships empty — the published ADG segregation table is not in this system, and writing it from memory would be inventing compliance data. An empty matrix behaves exactly as no matrix at all.

⛔ Segregation is the one place in dispatch where adding data makes the system more permissive. Everywhere else, a missing figure causes a refusal. Here, a row saying two classes may share is a row that puts them on the same deck. So an absent pair is unknown, unknown refuses, and every row in the matrix has to name its source.

Where the Code permits two classes “separated by a distance”, this system treats that as not in the same compartment. It records no separation distances, and converting the rule into metres would assert a distance nobody supplied.

The balance indicator

Longitudinal centre of gravity as a fraction of deck length, shown as a balance reading.

⚠️ It is not an axle-mass check and never claims to be. A real axle-load calculation needs axle positions, spacing and per-axle mass limits. The system holds an axle count, an axle configuration label and a regulatory maximum — none of which locates an axle. A warning implying a legal axle check would be a warning the data cannot support.

What you will not find here

There is no bare utilisation percentage anywhere on this panel. A confident 92.4% is the single most dangerous number this feature could emit, because it is silent about everything that could not be placed. The placed count and the unplaced count are always given in the same breath.