(Tc) Technique for Finding Optimal Solution To Transportation Problem

Abstract

Given the importance of increasing economic openness transport companies’ face various issues arising at present time, this required importing different types of goods with different means of transport. Therefore, these companies pay great attention to reducing total costs of transporting commodities by using numbers means of transport methods from their sources to the destinations.

The majority of private companies do not acquire the knowledge of using operations research methods, especially transport models, through which the total costs can be reduced, resulting in the importance and need to solve such a problem. This research presents a proposed method for the sum of Total Costs (Tc) of rows and columns, in order to arrive at the initial solutions accepted by its algorithm and compare the solution with a set of solutions that were reached through classic methods studied previously. Moreover, this research aims to compare results obtained using the proposed method versus the optimal solution after testing using the modified distribution method (MODI), and the percentile deviation scale, these tests were used to measure the efficiency of the solution for the proposed method with the optimal solution.

It was concluded that the proposed method is the easiest with the least iterations number of calculations, which in turn resulted in reaching the optimal solution in transporting the optimal quantities and reducing total costs of transportation from various sources to the requesting destinations. Thus, the proposed method can be used by the companies operating in importation-exportation field to find optimal solutions for the transportation of various commodities.

Key words: Total cost, Optimal Solution, Transportation problem, Degeneracy.