An Effective Solution Approach Based on Extension Principle for Fuzzy Minimal Cost Flow Problem

Abstract

A well-known version of minimal cost flow problem with fuzzy arc costs is focused in this study. The fuzzy arc costs is applied as in most of real-world applications, the parameters have high degree of uncertainty. The goal of this problem is to determine the minimum fuzzy cost of sending and passing a specified flow value in to and from a network. A decomposition-based solution methodology is introduced to tackle this problem. The methodology applies Zadeh’s extension principle to decompose the problem to two upper bound and lower bound problems. These problems are capable of being solved for different α-cut values to construct the fuzzy cost flow value as the objective function value. The efficiency of the proposed solution methodology is studied over some well-known examples of the minimal cost flow problem. The obtained results and the procedure applied to obtain them prove the superiority of the proposed approach comparing to the previous approaches of the literature.