Definition of Transportation Zone Hierarchies

Purpose

You need a transportation zone hierarchy to model transportation zones. In the transportation zone hierarchy, you assign several locations, for example customers, to a transportation zone.

Using transportation zones has the advantage that you can reduce the number of transportation lanes that need to be processed.

For each transportation zone, you have to create the following two transportation lanes:

A transportation lane between the source location and the transportation zone (reference transportation lane)
A transportation lane for transportation zone to itself, that is, you enter the same transportation zone as both the source and destination location (intrazone lane)

The optimizer creates all of the other transportation lanes during the optimization run (runtime lanes):

All of the transportation lanes between the source location and every customer within the transportation zone (based on the reference transportation lane)
All of the transportation lanes between the individual customers within the transportation zone (based on the intrazone lane)

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text.

The costs that the optimizer takes into account depend on the settings you make in the cost profile. If you enter in the cost profile that the system should use the costs defined for the transportation lane, the optimizer takes into account the costs defined for the reference transportation lane or intrazone lane.

The optimizer also calculates the actual distance and duration of runtime generated transportation lanes on the basis of the values that you define for the reference transportation lane or intrazone lane.

Reference transportation lane: The calculation is either based on the "actual distance to aerial distance" defined for the means of transport, or the manually defined distance and duration.
Intrazone lane: The calculation is based on the "actual distance to aerial distance" factor for the means of transport.

Process

You create a two-level location hierarchy structure in Customizing. Choose Master Data Hierarchy Define Hierarchy Structure .
In Customizing, enter this structure as the transportation lane hierarchy structure. Select Transportation Planning/Vehicle Scheduling (TP/VS) Basic Settings Maintain Transportation-Relevant Hierarchy.
You create a hierarchy for this structure. To do so, on the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Advanced Planning and Optimization Master Data Hierarchy Maintain Hierarchy.
Assign the hierarchy to active model 000. To do this, on the SAP Easy Access screen, choose Advanced Planning and Optimization Master Data Hierarchy Maintain Hierarchy .
There are two ways to assign the locations to your hierarchy:
- You can implement the hierarchy manually in the SAP APO master data. To do this, hang the relevant locations into the hierarchy (transportation zone as level 1 node, customer as sub-node on level 2).
- You can assign the customers to a transportation zone in SAP R/3 and then transfer the customers to SAP APO . SAP APO creates the transportation zone automatically and generates the corresponding hierarchy entries. You can edit the hierarchy manually in the SAP APO master data. Choose Master Data Hierarchy Define Hierarchy .