Solving transportation problems with warehouse locations based on greedy algorithm

摘要

Greedy algorithm is a common-used method to solve many different types of problems. Researches were done a lot that use greedy algorithm to solve classical transportation problems. This paper discussed how to apply greedy algorithm in transportation problems with warehouses location. The main idea of the improved algorithm is adding average fixed costs to unit transport costs. Then we use this method to solve a realistic problem in a company called SportStuff.com, and we found that although greedy algorithm usually cannot give out the optimal solution, it could provide a satisfactory suboptimal solution simply and quickly. And when the scale of problem increases, its solution will become closer to the optimal one. However, it still has some other limitations in solving more realistic problems.