Smita Sood and Keerti Jain

ABSTRACT

In industries, raw material (finished products) is transported from factories to ware houses or vice-versa, which involves transportation cost. To optimize this cost and hence reduce the total cost of finished product, transportation problem is used. In Mathematics and Economics, transportation theory is the name given to the study of optimal transportation and allocation of resources. The transportation problem is a special case of Linear Programming Problem which deals with the distribution of single commodity from various sources of supply to various destinations of demand in such a manner that the total transportation cost is minimized. The existing methods to find initial basic feasible solutions are North West-Corner Method (NWCM), Least Cost Method (LCM) and Vogel’s Approximation Method (VAM). In this paper a new method is proposed for finding an initial basic feasible solution of a transportation problem. The method discussed in this paper is named as Maximum Difference Method. This method gives an initial basic feasible solution of the transportation problem, which is most of the time better than that of Vogel’s Approximation Method (VAM). The proposed algorithm is illustrated using some numerical examples.