A Study on the Numerical Methods of Solving Transportation Problem

Transportation Problem

Transportation model has been considered as one of the important applications of Linear Programming Problem (LPP). It is mainly concerned in determining the schedule for transportation of goods to a specified place in such a way that minimizes the shipping cost and satisfies all the supply and demand constraints. Transportation model has been considered as a very lucrative method in logistics and supply chain management for reducing cost and improving service. As the transportation problem modeled as linear programming problem, it can be solved by simplex method but this is very time consuming and complex technique. Hence different methods and algorithms have been developed to support the transportation problem and to find the solution in a very easy manner. Some popular methods are simplex method, Vogel Approximation Method (VAM), North West Corner Rule (NWCR), Least Cost Method, Row Minimum Method; Column Minimum method. The transportation problems can be solved by using the simplex methods, which is a time-consuming solution. The main aim of these thesis transportation problem solution methods is to minimize the cost or the time of transportation. Most of the currently used methods for solving transportation problems are trying to reach the optimal solution, whereby, most of these methods are considered complex and very expansive in term of the execution time. In this study we use the best candidate method (BCM), in which the key idea is to minimize the combinations of the solution by choosing the best candidates to reach the optimal solution.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.