Glossary

The platform's vocabulary, term by term.

In detail

The platform

Platform

The Arkipelis whole: a central control plane, neutral with respect to the products, and two twin product applications — Fleet and Octopoda — carried by a common administration.

Fleet

The device-centred application: building, deploying and monitoring an account's device fleet.

Octopoda

The module-centred application: running the business side of the fleet. Two subscribable suites — Data (data, alerts, portal per account) and Distrib (automated distribution and connected point of sale) — plus Pay, the option that takes payment.

Facet

A subscribable functional scope of Octopoda. Modules, pages and interfaces belong to a facet, and the account's licence activates the ones subscribed.

Account

An end customer, a brand or a distinct organisation, strictly isolated from the others. One operator can manage several accounts.

Zone

A complete and independent environment of cloud resources — registry, storage, secrets, runtime — typically per region or per environment.

Shared zone

A shared zone operated by Arkipelis: minimal cost, immediate start.

Dedicated zone

A zone deployed on the customer's own cloud — their subscription, their resource group: their data and their images stay with them.

Reconciliation component

The always-on component of a zone that reconciles product deployments by convergence, pulling the changes.

White labelling

The complete customisation of everything the end customer sees — device screens, portals — to their own identity and their own domain. Arkipelis does not appear on their side.

Tamper-proof record

A record of events — deployments, actions, changes — that can be neither modified nor deleted, even by an administrator.

Viewing as a user

An administrator sees the portal as a given user: a context whose user axis is set to that person, read-only, with no monetary action, a visible banner and every access audited.

Devices

Fleet (a fleet)

A homogeneous group of devices sharing the same configuration and the same version. An account can have several.

Device

The monitored physical device. Each device belongs to a fleet.

Embedded agent

The program present on every device: it talks to the cloud, converges deployments, tracks state and enables remote actions. It updates itself remotely, with no card rewriting.

Module

A self-contained application building block that runs on a device: interface, service, hardware, payment, logs. Also called an "application".

Hub

The module that carries the local communication bus. It starts first, and the other modules discover one another through it.

Image

The file containing an account's customised operating system, ready to write to a card. Built from a base image and customisation scripts.

Device class

A named settings profile — active modules, memory, variables — applied to a category of hardware, to manage a heterogeneous fleet within one fleet.

Override

A setting that departs from the default, applied at fleet or device level. It is a declared state then reconciled, used for trials and special cases.

Rewrite

Replacing a device's card. It is detected automatically, and the operator chooses whether to keep the device's identity.

Immediate cut-off

Disabling a device from the console: its heartbeats are rejected and it disappears from active fleets, but its history is kept. It is reversible.

Things

A device's sensors, actuators and peripherals, declared in the configuration according to the capability contract. They are played by the generic simulator or driven by the generic driver — with the same business code in both cases.

Declared workstation

A developer's machine declared as a device of the fleet: it receives managed secrets and announces itself as a device, without receiving deployments.

Technician tool

The field technician's standalone tool: it fetches a short certificate, sets the device's network over a USB cable, and opens remote access or the local interface — with no network on site.

The business side

Context

A portal's scope along eight combinable axes — organisations, fleets, devices, sites, points of sale, merchants, users, zones — with its pages, its visual identity and its dashboard. A user has one role per context.

Organisation

A company, a department or an end customer attached to consumers and points of sale. It is the axis along which sales and subsidies are broken down: the platform provides the figures, the operator invoices.

Merchant

The entity that sells a product in a machine — the supplier, on the catalogue side. Distinct from a user: a context whose merchant axis lists them opens the portal to whoever the operator chooses.

Octopod

The business identity of the point of sale, distinct from the device that carries it. The link between the two is dated and recorded: a replaced box loses neither sales nor configuration.

Point of sale

An octopod as seen by the Distrib facet: its type — fridge, bar, coffee — its site, its organisation, its business status, its selling configuration, its sales and its operations.

Publication

The signed snapshot of a point of sale's catalogue and offers, downloaded and verified by the machine. The cloud prices from the same snapshot, and an inconsistent publication is refused — the machine keeps the previous one.

Shelf plan

The layout of an offer in a machine with locations — shelves, spirals, doors: which product, in which place, at which price, with what capacity. The other layout is the menu.

Recipe machine

A point of sale that makes the product — drinks bar, coffee machine: a menu by category and size, consumables with thresholds, a pour measured and billed in proportion to the volume served.

Review

A doubtful sale — a price discrepancy between machine and cloud, an exceeded quota, low detection confidence, a quality sample — is not charged: it goes under review, and a manager confirms, corrects or cancels it.

Sentinel

The operation generated by the machine when the door opens while the lock is engaged and no session is under way: the incident is logged, the loss valued, and never charged.

Settlement part

A sale is settled in one or several parts — subsidy, credit note, voucher, wallet, terminal, cash. Each part has its status, and a replay resumes without ever charging again.

Deposit

A container charged or deferred at the sale, with the record of containers in circulation; the return produces a credit note.

Expiry date

Default shelf life in the catalogue, actual date set at loading, expiry alerts, expired products unsellable and closest-to-expiry sold first.

Closing report

The immutable and numbered report at the end of a till session, by payment means, rate and seller. With tamper-proofing and chained receipts, it carries the applicable compliance.

Technical terms

GitOps

The model where the target configuration lives in a versioned repository: deploying means pointing to a version, and the device converges on its own by pulling the changes.

Remote update

Updating the agent and system patches without rewriting cards, with two slots, a watchdog and automatic rollback.

Pre-loading

Including the application images inside the system image, for a first boot with no network.

Capability contract

The contract between the selling agent and the hardware: each driver — real, simulated or Android terminal — publishes its typed "things" and their state, and accepts the same idempotent commands.

Agent kit

The package shared by every selling agent: local bus, things, eligibility, local authorisation, cloud access and managed keys.

Site server

Each portal's server: it holds the session, sets the role, the user and the context on every call, and routes to the right facet's interface.

Companion role

The mode where the Android terminal connects to the box's local bus as a peripheral — payment terminal, badge reader, screen: no new protocol, the selling agent sees it as hardware.

Fitting out an existing machine

Connecting an existing machine — coffee, vending, another brand's fridge — without modifying it: its payment terminal is replaced by an Android terminal carrying our application, plugged into the machine's standard bus.

Technician application

The embedded tabbed application for the installer: pairing the point of sale, factory tests of the hardware, tests of the interfaces. It shows on the machine's screen for as long as it is unbound.

Payment service provider

The party that takes the card payment online on the merchant's behalf. The payment module connects to it through a connector, and a simulated connector serves demonstrations. The platform never sees a card number.

Terminal security standard

The standard applicable to payment terminals, which the terminal module complies with.

Vending machine bus protocol

The standard internal communication protocol of vending machines — coin mechanism, reader, machine. It is one of the two ways to connect.

Vending data exchange

The standard for exchanging vending machines' audit data — sales, stock, machine events. Collecting it relies on the platform's native file upload.

Semantic versioning

The three-number versioning used for the agent, the modules and the shared library.

Obfuscation and compression

The treatment applied to distributed binaries to protect proprietary code, with no opt-out.