An Iterative Solution Technique to Minimize the Average Transportation Cost of Capacitated Transportation Problem with Bounds on Rim Conditions

Abstract

The average transportation cost minimization of capacitated transportation problem with bounds on rim conditions (CTPBRC) is an important optimization problem due to the requirement of low unit cost consumption in production system. In the literature, there is only one approach to solving a special case of this problem, but it is not applicable to the general case. In this paper, this problem is reduced to a series of finding the minimum cost maximum flow in a network with lower and upper arc capacities, and two iterative algorithms are proposed as more generalized solution method for this problem as compared to the existing approach. Computational experiments on randomly generated instances validate that the two iterative algorithms are generally able to find the minimum average transportation cost solution to CTPBRC efficiently for the general case, in which one iterative algorithm has higher efficiency than the other for large size instances.