Transportation regions

Multi-stop estimation makes use of transportation regions. These are polygonal areas defined by enclosing customers. Create one or more regions in the Transportation Regions table, then assign customers to regions by populating the Transportation Region column in the Customers table. You can also generate regions automatically based on any column in the Customers table and optionally assign the regions when they are generated. For example, you can select State as the column for region generation. A region is generated for each unique state, then all customers with the same State value are assigned to the same region. See Generating regions for additional information. If you do not assign customers to a specific Transportation Region, the "Default Region" is used for those customers when performing multi-stop estimation.

The area of the region is calculated as follows:

• Find the centroid of the customer locations that are included in the region.
• A shape is calculated that represents the area.

You can override the area of a region using the Area Override field in the Transportation Regions table. Area overrides are applied only if you select the “Use Transport Region Override Area” option in Multi-stop estimation options.

You can also override the percentage of drop outliers that are eliminated when calculating the region's area as described in Transportation region outliers.

Transportation region outliers

When calculating the area for a region-mode combination, drop outliers can be eliminated. By default, the furthest 20 percent of the drops are eliminated from the area based on the calculated centroid of all the drops. When using Supply Chain Guru X, you can control the percentage of drop outliers that are removed from the region calculation by directly setting an option in the Options table of the model database:

• MSEAreaDistanceExtentPercentage - Set this value to the percentage of drops to be included when calculating the region area. The value must be in the range of 0.001 – 1.000 where 1.000 indicates 100 percent.

This option is not currently exposed in the user interface. To make use of it, you must add the option as a record in the Options table in the model database, using SQL Server Management Studio for example. Enter MSEAreaDistanceExtentPercentage in the Option column and the percentage in the Value column. If the option does not exist in the Options table, the default used for region calculation is 0.8, which equates to the 20 percent elimination of outliers.