Abstract
To further motivate the structure and the economic interpretation of a linear programming model, we will now discuss a transportation problem. Together with the minimum-cost diet problem of Stigler, the transportation problem was among the first formulations of linear programming problems. The Russian L. V. Kantorovich formulated the first specification of the problem in 1939, but his work became known in the West about a decade later. In 1941, Frank L. Hitchcock wrote a paper in the Journal of Mathematics and Physics whose title seems more fit for a journal of economics: “The Distribution of a Product from Several Sources to Numerous Localities.” In that paper he also gave the correct solution of a numerical example by means of an algorithm, which is probably the first solution method for a linear programming problem.
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