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Building an EPD usually means hand-attaching a transport lane to every material in the bill of materials. Auto-assign transport does it for you: for each material input, Variable reads the facility the material is made at (or its supplier’s location) and the facility your product is made at, finds an existing transport lane that connects those two points, and creates the transport input — using the input’s own computed weight. It never overwrites transport it didn’t assign, or a lane you changed after it did.

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How matching works

For every material input in the model, auto-assign resolves two points and looks for a lane between them. A material input with a negative weight (or, when it has no weight, a negative quantity), such as scrap credited back to the model, reads as not applicable: it isn’t shipped in, so auto-assign doesn’t give it transport. Transport it already has, added by hand or assigned on an earlier run, stays as it is. A lane matches when its start falls within the chosen radius of the origin and its end falls within the radius of the destination. Multi-leg lanes are matched on their endpoints only — the stops in between don’t matter. For a product in an LCA group, only lanes in the group’s inventory can be assigned, and a lane that uses a transport mode you modeled yourself (not a built-in one) needs that mode in the inventory too. When the nearest matching lane is outside the group’s inventory, the input reads as not in group inventory rather than taking a farther lane: add the lane (and its mode) to the group. When more than one lane matches, Variable ranks them:
  • A lane whose endpoint is the exact origin or destination location (not just nearby) ranks ahead of one that only falls within the radius.
  • Otherwise the lane closest to both points — the smallest combined start + end distance — wins.
The single closest lane is assigned. If two lanes are effectively tied with no clear winner, auto-assign leaves the input alone and reports it as ambiguous rather than guess.
Auto-assign only reads lanes you already have. If a model’s materials have no nearby lane, model the supplier-to-factory lane once, then re-run — every input that now matches gets filled in.

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The radius

Matching is radius-based because a supplier’s geocoded address almost never lands exactly on a lane’s endpoint. The radius is the straight-line distance (in km) a lane’s start and end can sit from the origin and destination and still count as a match.
  • The default is 50 km. Both the button and the bulk action expose a radius control, so you can widen or tighten it per run.
  • A larger radius finds more matches but raises the chance of an ambiguous result when several lanes fall in range.
  • Set it to 0 to match only lanes whose endpoints are the exact origin and destination locations.

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Running it

Auto-assign never runs on its own — you always trigger it. Transport it assigned on an earlier run is matched again, and replaced only when a different lane now wins.
1

From a single product

On the product’s LCA, in the inputs section, use Auto-assign transport. It walks every material input in that bill of materials.
2

For many products at once

On the product list, select the products and choose Auto-assign transport from the bulk actions.
3

Set the radius and review

Set the radius, run, and Variable processes the products in the background. When it finishes you get a summary grouped by result, naming the materials in each result — under Show lines on each product when you ran many. When you ran many, the totals cover every product and the list shows the first 100; Show more products loads the next 100. Tick Preview only to get that summary without assigning anything — worth doing before a re-run that could reassign transport across many products. The single-product and single-line dialogs have the same checkbox; the single-product dialog lists the materials under each result, and the single-line dialog shows that line’s result.

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Results

Every input lands in one of these buckets:
No origin and no destination usually mean missing location data. Set the facility on the material or product, or add a location to the supplier, then re-run — auto-assign is safe to repeat. If a re-run finds no clear lane for transport it assigned earlier, it keeps that lane and reports why.