Westvaco produces and sells more than $2 billion worth of paper products each year. It has developed a spreadsheet-based distribution tool to assign truckloads to different motor carriers daily. The details of Westvaco Company and this distribution tool can be found in the case study "Optimized motor carrier selection at Westvaco". 

Fairness problem: Westvaco has noticed that the tool is good for finding a low-cost distribution plan but may not be able to maintain fairness among carriers. For example, some carriers may not be assigned any job for several days in a week which upsets the drivers. Currently, the transportation planner has to allocate commitments manually which is difficult in some situations.

Carrier reduction problem: Westvaco has found it hard to manage too many carriers (six at the moment). However it is not sure how the reduction of the number of carriers may impact on the distribution cost and fairness.

 Questions 

1. Investigate how to model and optimise the fairness problem based on the data for one week's load which is provided as an EXCEL spreadsheet in this assessment task. Please note that definition of fairness in your report must be reasonable although "fairness" is quite subjective.

2. Investigate how to model and optimise the carrier reduction problem.