A comparative study of initial basic feasible solution methods for transportation problems

Abstract

In this research three methods have been used to find an initial basic feasible solution for the balanced transportation model. We have used a new method of Minimum Transportation Cost Method (MTCM) to find the initial basic feasible solution for the solved problem by Hakim [2]. Hakim used Proposed Approximation Method (PAM) to find initial basic feasible solution for balanced transportation model and then compared the results with Vogel’s Approximation Method (VAM) [2]. The results of both methods were noted to be the same but here we have taken the same transportation model and used MTCM to find its initial basic feasible solution and compared the result with PAM and VAM. It is noted that the MTCM process provides not only the minimum transportation cost but also an optimal solution.

Keywords: Transportation problem, Vogel’s Approximation Method (VAM), Maximum

Penalty of largest numbers of each Row