Adjust Transport Data

You can adjust the transport data to find out how it affects your results. There are two tables on this page. One with Transport Cost Data and one with Transport Constraint Data.

Transport Cost Data

In this table you can see the Transport Cost Data and the availability data as you have specified it in your Excel input data file. So, when you have specified the data on group levels, you will see this same data instead of data for all individual lanes. If the checkbox of Base Case Constraints is checked on the control panel, you can use the Base Case Lane column. In this case Available and Exlude columns will be still visible but won't have effect on optimization, nor will min and max constraints. Changes to these columns will be effective after turning off Base Case Constraints. You have to pay attention to have enough active lanes in the Base Case Lane column, otherwise it may cause infeasibility.

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Availability

You can modify the available column to turn off/on one or more (groups of) lanes. If you have specified Exclude (Transport) data in your Excel file, this data is visible here as well. These lanes are excluded in the model. This can be convenient when specifying the availability for a group in which only a few lanes are not available. When using only the Available attribute, you need to specify all individual available lanes, while using the Exclude (Transport) attribute as well, allows you to specify the availability of the whole group in one line, after which you need a few additional lines to exclude the non-available lanes. If you later want to include these lanes, you can either check the Available checkbox or uncheck the Exclude (Transport) checkbox.

Cost

The Transport Cost Data table also shows all cost related data. Please note that you don't have to specify this data for excluded lanes. When re-including one or more of these lanes, you don't have to specify the cost data either when it is already specified for the group in which these lanes are included.

Drop Size Data

This table is active when you use Rate Cards to specify the transportation cost.

Note

Rate Cards are another way of specifying the cost of transportation. The rate card data consists of the price per unit based on the distance value and drop size. The unit can either be the application unit, specified earlier, or any given unit (like kg/lbs/m3/ft3).

The distance and drop size bounds of rate card bands as well as the cost for each band are specified in the template, and these values can be find in this table. You cannot modify the bounds of the bands, only the costs.

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Transport Constraint Data

In this table you can modify the minimum and maximum capacity data that you specified in your Excel input file, to find out how it affects your results. If the checkbox of Base Case Constraints is checked on the control panel, you can use the Base Case Volume column. Minimum and maximum capacity columns will be still visible and if the Base Case Volume is zero for a given lane, the optimization will use these, if however, there is Base Case Volume specified other than 0 they are ignored. Changes to these columns will be effective after turning off Base Case Constraints. You have to pay attention to specify exact values only for single lanes (and not for all lanes between location groups), otherwise it can easily cause infeasibility.

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Transport Step Cost Data

This table is active when you use Stepwise Cost to specify the transportation cost.

Note

Stepwise Cost is another way of specifying the cost of transportation. It is applied when there are one or more thresholds in costing, so when the volume exceeds a threshold the transportation cost (Step Cost Per THU) drops to a smaller value.

In this table you can enable/disable steps, and modify the thresholds as well as the costs for each step, with some restrictions. If a lane is disabled, it is not possible the enable stepwise costing for that lane. In other cases you may make some changes, but you will get an error message, if your change causes inconsistency.

  • The upper threshold for step 1 have to be equal to the lower threshold of step 2 (and so on...).

  • For a lane all steps have to be enabled or disabled, as well as incremental or not incremental, no mixing.

  • If you specify capacity for product group for one step, you have to specify it for all the steps.

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Mode Allowed by Resource

Network Design requires you to specify transport cost, capacity and capabilities by origin and destination location. However, in some situations, it can be helpful to restrict the mode of transportation based on the resource. This allows you to model different resources (at one location) that have a different purpose, you can modify these restrictions in this table.