A new algorithm for solving uncapacitated transportation problem with interval-defined demands and suppliers capacities

Abstract

The uncapacitated transportation problem (UTP) deals with minimizing the transportation costs related to the delivery of a homogeneous product from multi-suppliers to multi-consumers. The application of the UTP can be extended to other areas of operations research, including inventory control, personnel assignment, signature matching, product distribution with uncertainty, multi-period production and inventory planning, employment scheduling, and cash management. Such a UTP with interval-defined demands and suppliers capacities (UTPIDS) is investigated in this paper. In UTPIDS, the demands and suppliers capacities may not be known exactly but vary within an interval due to variation in the economic conditions of the global economy. Following the variation, the minimal total cost of the transportation can also be varied within an interval and thus, the cost bounds can be obtained. Here, although the lower bound solution can be attained methodologically, the correct estimation of the worst case realization (the exact upper bound) on the minimal total transportation cost of the UTPIDS is an NP-hard problem. So, the decision-makers seek for minimizing the transportation costs and they are interested in the estimation of the worst case realization on these minimal costs for better decision making especially, for proper investment and return. In literature very few approaches are available to find this estimation of the worst case realization with some shortcomings. First, we demonstrate that the available heuristic methods fail to obtain the correct estimation of the worst case realization always. In this situation, development of a better heuristic method to find the better near optimal estimation of the worst case realization on the minimal total costs of the UTPIDS is desirable. Then this paper provides a new polynomial time algorithm that runs in O (N2) time (N, higher of the numbers of source and destination nodes) for better estimation. A comparative assessment on solutions of available benchmark instances, some randomly generated numerical example problems and a real-world application shows promising performance of the current technique. So, our new finding would definitely be benefited to practitioners, academics and decision makers who deal with such type of decision making instances.