Improved Least Cost Method to Obtain a Better IBFS to the Transportation Problem

摘要

Transportation modeling is a technique that is used toway out the shipping of supplies from a number of sources to a number ofdestinations as well as to minimize the total shipment cost. This kind ofproblem is known as transportation problem (TP). Solution procedure of TP playsa vital role in operation research for its wide application in real world. Inthe solution procedure of a TP, finding an initial basic feasible solution(IBFS) is necessary to obtain the optimal solution. Least Cost Method (LCM) isone such procedure which is based on cost cells. This solution procedure startswith allocating as much shipments as possible to the cell with the smallestunit cost cell. In this paper we propose an effective improvement of LCM in thesolution procedure to obtain a better IBFS for the TPs. To verify theperformance of the proposed method, a comparative study is also carried out.Simulation results show that Improved Least Cost Method (iLCM) yields betterIBFS in 80% cases than LCM.