An interactive approach for the multi-objective transportation problem with interval parameters

Abstract

The basic transportation problem (TP) deals with the transportation of goods from a set of supply points to a set of demand points so as to minimise linear transportation costs. The multi-objective transportation problem (MOTP) extends TP to take into consideration multiple conflicting objectives such as transportation cost, average delivery time of the commodities, unfulfilled demand and so forth. We develop an interactive approach to determine the preferred compromise solution for the MOTP where the coefficients of the objective functions and the source and destination parameters have been expressed as interval values by the decision-maker to deal with the impreciseness in the parameters. The proposed method is applied to a real-world MOTP faced by a leading provider of complete broadband access solutions. Results of the case study indicate that the developed method is a practical technique for solving the MOTP with interval parameters.