Abstract: Freight costs may be calculated by selecting an agreement from many different possible agreements and then aggregating shipping costs specified in shipping cost fields of the selected agreement. An agreement may be selected depending on a relative hierarchy of a party specified in a party field of a transportation agreement record as compared to the other transportation agreement records relating to the shipping route. Each of the identified transportation agreement records relating to the shipping route may classified according to the relative of hierarchy of in the party specified in the record in relation to the hierarchy of other parties in the other identified records. A leading charge type indicator may be considered during the agreement selection process.

Abstract: A through rate evaluation processing is done by breaking down a transportation network to transportation stages and then a master data is scanned for the rates of the transportation stages. The complete network is evaluated recursively to get the rates and a calculation is performed to get the best rates.