Requirements

We are working for a retail company that buys its products from different places in Asian mostly. each shop can go to the buying web site and say what he wants and put an order. Up to now, the transport cost was a estimated but not calculated on the content of the order. The purpose is to implement such a calculator.

Data model

A customer puts an order that contains products. An order contains a lot of products with a number. A product has

• a name

• a height,

• a width,

• a depth,

• transport type : if the product can be put with other products in a pallet, individual(alone) or bulk (like sand for example)

• a weight

A product can be put on a pallet. a pallet 120 cm width and and 80 cm depth. It can be maximum 2 meters height and the weight should not exceed 1400 kg. We should use a simple algorithm to fill each pallet. It will be not optimized but we should used that as a margin of the costs. a product that is bigger than 60 cm in width or depth or higher than 1m should be put alone in a pallet.

All products start from the same city and go to the same city in an order. A trip is composed f steps. Each step can be done by train, boat or truck.

Here is the list of products in our test order.

Product	Transport type	Number	Height	Weight	Depth	Weight
Drill	pallet	1000	20cm	40cm	30cm	2 kg
Screwdriver	pallet	30000	3cm	2cm	20cm	0,2 kg
Sand	bulk					35 Tons
Gravel	bulk					14 Tons
Furniture	individual	23				500 kg

And the trip is a follows :

#	start city	arrival city	distance (km)	travel mode
1	Shangai	Rotterdam	22000	Boat
2	Rotterdam	Tournai	300	Train
3	Tournai	Lille	20	Truck

There are 3 types of costs :

• transport costs per Pallet

Transport	Cost
Boat	0,2€\/km
Train	0,5€\/km
Truck	1€\/km

• Taxes

City	Cost
Shangai	0,02€\/kg
Rotterdam	0,05€\/kg and 1€ per handling person
Tournai	2€ per handling person
Lille	30€ per handling person

• handling

City	Cost
Shangai	20€\/hour and a person can handle 13 pallets\/hour
Rotterdam	45€\/hour and a person can handle 60 pallets\/hour
Tournai	67€\/hour and a person can handle 40 pallets\/hour
Lille	79€\/hour and a person can handle 30 pallets\/hour

The handling should not take more than 12 hours per city.

The source code and the solution can be found here.