Zone Tables

Zone Tables are a method to perform routing and pricing for shipments. The purpose of a Zone Table is, for a given carrier (or a specific service) to map any origin and destination address to a Zone.

Zones are used for determining the price of a shipment using Rate Sheets. Typically a Rate Sheet is a grid that assigns a Price to a combination of a Zone and some shipment metric (usually a weight bracket or number of boxes).

Zone Table Components

Zone Tables are comprised of these elements:

Entity	Description
Place	Represents the Origin or Destination in a Route. It is defined by a collection of Locations.
Location	In a specified country, either a city or a range of postal codes or zip codes. Any address should map to exactly one Location.
Route	A connection between an Origin Place and a Destination Place that maps on to a specific Zone.
Zone	A collection of routes representing the same transport costs.

This dynamic system can be used to represent most carrier pricing systems. The illustration below shows how these entities interact to map addresses to zones.