Title: A novel approach to find simple, pragmatic solutions to transportation problems

Authors: Satakshi; Vishal V. Henry

Addresses: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, SHUATS, Prayagraj, India ' Department of Mathematics and Statistics, SHUATS, Prayagraj, India

Abstract: The transportation problem is a special case of a linear programming problem (LPP), and its goal is to determine the least/optimal shipping cost that satisfies both the supply and demand constraints simultaneously. An initial basic feasible solution (IBFS) is used to determine the optimal solution. Many methods can be found in the literature to find IBFS. Some of them are Vogel's approximation method (VAM), least cost method (LCM), and North West corner method (NWCM). Among these methods, VAM provides a better solution than other existing methods. This paper proposes a new transportation method (SVAM), inspired by VAM to find IBFS. SVAM performs better than VAM with respect to computation time as it takes very less computation time compared to VAM. The SciLab (V6.1.1) programming is used to implement the algorithm for solving the examples and finding the computation times of all the methods. To establish the correctness of the proposed method, many examples are solved and checked for SVAM and compared with VAM and LCM.

Keywords: transportation problem; initial basic feasible solution; IBFS; Vogel's approximation method; VAM; least cost method; LCM.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMOR.2024.138467

International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, 2024 Vol.27 No.4, pp.496 - 508

Received: 14 Oct 2022
Accepted: 18 Feb 2023
Published online: 04 May 2024 *

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