Transportation management engines

• 4 minutes

Transportation management engines define the logic that is used to generate and process transportation rates in Transportation management.

A transportation management engine calculates tasks, such as the carrier's transportation rate. The engine system lets you change calculation strategies at runtime, based on data in Supply Chain Management. A transportation management engine resembles a plug-in that is related to a carrier contract.

The following table shows the transportation management engines types that are available in Supply Chain Management.

Transportation management engine	Description
Rate engine	Calculates rates.
Generic engine	Simple auxiliary engines that are used by other engines that do not require data from Supply Chain Management, for example, an apportionment engine. Apportionment engines are used to reduce the final costs of transportation to specific orders and lines, based on dimensions such as volume and weight.
Mileage engine	Calculates the transportation distance.
Transit time engine	Calculates the time that is required to travel from the start to the end destination.
Zone engine	Calculates the zone based on the current address and calculates the number of zones that must be crossed to travel from address A to address B.

To rate a shipment by using a specific carrier, you must configure multiple transportation management engines. The Rate engine is required, but other transportation management engines might be required to support the Rate engine. For example, the Rate engine can be used to retrieve data from the Mileage engine to calculate the rate based on mileage between the source and the destination.

The data that you use when you calculate rates is controlled by the metadata configuration. For example, if you want to search for rates based on postal codes, you must set up metadata based on the lookup type of a postal code.

Transportation management engines that are used to retrieve the data that is required for rate calculation from external systems don't need metadata. The rate data for these engines can be retrieved from external transportation carrier systems, usually through a web service. For example, you can use a mileage engine that retrieves data directly from Bing maps so that you don't need a metadata for this engine.

Metadata for transportation management engines is configured differently for the different types of engines.

Transportation management engine	Metadata configuration
Rate engine	Requires a Rate base type. The rate base type contains metadata for the rate base data and the rate base assignment data. The structure of rate base metadata is determined by the type of rate engine. The structure of the rate base assignment metadata is determined by the type of rate base assigner that is associated with that rate engine. You can set up the rate base type of a rate engine on the Rate engine page and on the Rate master page.
Zone engine	Requires metadata to be set up directly on the zone master.
Transit time engine and Mileage engine	Retrieves the metadata directly from the mileage engine's configuration setup form.

Example of metadata for a rate engine

The transportation management engine requires identification of the origin address, the destination state and country or region, and the start and end point of the shipment. By using these requirements, the metadata would look like the data in the following table. The table also includes information about what type of input data is required.

You can set up this information in Transportation management > Setup on the Rating metadata page.

Sequence	Name	Field type	Data type	Lookup type	Mandatory
1	Origin postal code	Assignment	String	Postal Code	Selected
2	Destination state	Assignment	String	State
3	Destination start postal code	Assignment	String	Postal Code	Selected
4	Destination end postal code	Assignment	String	Postal Code	Selected
5	Destination country	Assignment	String	Country/region