Journal of Applied Mathematics & Bioinformatics

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

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• Abstract

   

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