Most of the practical applications of a transportation network, in addition to the variable cost, there incurs a fixed charge. This work formulates a Multi-Stage Multi-Period Fixed Charge Transportation Problem for a multi-product scenario. The problem is modeled using an optimization modeling tool, ‘A Mathematical Programming Language’ and its solution is obtained in BONMIN solver. The exact algorithms mostly require longer computational time to find an optimal solution for large problem size that are in practice. In these operational problems, in which process speed is as important as the solution quality, an Ant Colony Optimization based heuristic is proposed. Finally, the solution obtained from proposed heuristic is compared with that of exact methods using randomly generated data sets. The comparative analysis shows the competitiveness of the proposed heuristic.
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