In most cases, a steel plant uses long term contracts to ship end products

to its customers by procuring services from logistics firms that have long
term contracts. However,The Logistics department of thislarge steel plant
wantsto streamlineabidding process for out of contract biddings which may
occur in unplanned situations. Meaning that unexpected customer demand
may be met by procuring out of contract services as soon as possible. Out
of contractbiddings are potentially open to a larger pool of logistics firms.
This type of bidding requires acertainnumberand typeof trucks to be
procured.IT department was asked to develop a system which will
beopento logistics companies via a web portal. Eachbidding maybeopen to
justselectedlogistics firms. In other words, only selected logistics firms can
bid for a particular bidding request. Oncethebiddingstarts,bidders should be
able to see the destination information, date of the transportation, required
truck type and number of trucksand finally the end time of the bidding time
(bidding window).Biddersshould enternumber of trucksthat they can provide
and theirprice. These two inputs should beenteredinthe first stage.Note that
a portion of the required trucks can be bid. For example, if ten trucks are
neededthena logistics firm can bid for just four of them. So partial fulfilling is
accepted. After bidding ends, system should pickthe best offers to procure
required trucks at the minimum costin the next stage. After the
evaluationprocess, winning bidders are informed about how many trucks
they shouldprovideand the date and time information for the
transportation.At this stage,logistics firm should start for searching available
trucks on the market. Before the transportationdate, the plate numbersand
drivers’namesshould be provided to the steel plant for security clearances.
Bidding processends once plate numbers and drivers’names are submitted.
You are asked to design the data model for this system. Feel free to make
any assumptions regarding how system should work.
a-Write down your assumptionsin your answer.
b-What are the entities in your design? Their properties?
c-Draw the logical model in your preferredenvironment (for
examplelucidchart.com).
d-Make sure that you create the tables (relations) and provide their SQL
codes.
e-Provide also a brief explanation to describe how these tables are related
and their purposes.