Divide a city into courier zones, assign districts to depots and rebalance territories by moving one shared line, without opening a gap between two zones.
vectorstream is a geometry editor for web maps that stores the border between neighbouring zones once. Logistics and delivery teams use it to maintain delivery areas, courier and last-mile zones, depot catchments and service territories that must tile without gaps or overlaps: moving the line between two zones gives one zone more streets and the other fewer in the same edit. Zones import with a geometry check and export as GeoJSON to routing, dispatch or order systems.
Use cases
A city is divided into zones so that each courier or each route has a defined patch of streets. When order volumes shift, one zone grows too big and its neighbour too small, and the fix is to move the line between them.
Each depot, hub or store serves a catchment, and the catchments together cover the whole service region. Opening a new depot means carving its catchment out of the ones around it while the region stays covered without gaps.
The outer edge of a delivery area often follows a ring road or a river, and some ground along that edge is not served, such as an industrial estate or a closed campus on the river bank. That ground is taken off with the difference tool, and a strip along the edge is cut off when the service boundary is pulled in.
Why topology
Zones drawn as separate polygons leave thin gaps where nobody delivers and thin overlaps where two couriers do. vectorstream stores each zone border once, so adjoining zones always meet on the same line.
Rebalancing is trial and error. Exact undo restores every zone an edit touched, so a planner can try a new split before the busy season and step back to the previous layout without redrawing it.
Routing, dispatch and order systems each keep their own copy of the territories. vectorstream reads GeoJSON with a geometry check and writes GeoJSON, so the same polygons reach all of them.
How it works
Import zones, catchments and depot locations as GeoJSON. The geometry check reports broken polygons.
Move shared borders, split overloaded zones and merge quiet ones.
Split pieces off the neighbouring catchments, merge them into one catchment and place the depot marker.
Export the territories as GeoJSON for routing, dispatch and order management.
FAQ
Related