The visit plan

The visit plan is the sequence of places a vessel will occupy and the moves between them. It is the operational heart of a call: the movements board, the reports and the service jobs all read from it.

Moves and stays alternate

A plan is built from two kinds of step, and they alternate strictly:

Move → stay → move → stay → move

A move has a starting point and a destination. A stay has one location and a duration. A vessel cannot move from nowhere, and it cannot be in two places at once, so the alternation is enforced rather than merely encouraged.

A transit call — a vessel passing through without stopping — is the one exception in shape: it has an inbound move and an outbound move with no stay between them.

Roles on a move

Each move carries a role describing what it is: arrival, departure, a shift between berths, or a transit leg. The role is what lets the reports distinguish a vessel arriving from a vessel merely repositioning, which matters when you are counting arrivals.

Checks and requirements

A move can carry two kinds of precondition:

• A check is something that must be confirmed before the move: the gangway is secured, the draft has been verified, the berth is clear.
• A requirement is something that must be provided: a pilot, a tug, a mooring gang.

Every check and requirement attached to a move must be satisfied before the move can start.

Not yet built: defining checks and requirements per port, and attaching them to moves automatically when a plan is created. Until that exists, moves in a new organisation carry no checks or requirements, so nothing holds them back (#112).

Editing a plan

Steps can be inserted, removed and relocated while the call is open. Removing a stay renumbers what follows it, so the alternation is preserved without you having to fix the sequence by hand.

Once a call is closed, its plan stops accepting changes.