An efficient alternative approach to solve a transportation problem

Determination of an Initial Feasible Solution (IFS) to a transportation problem plays an important role in obtaining a minimal total transportation cost solution. Better initial feasible solution can result less number of iterations in attaining the minimal total cost solution. Recently, an efficient method denoted by JHM (Juman and Hoque’s Method) was proposed to obtain a better initial feasible solution to a transportation problem. In JHM only column penalties are considered. In this paper, a new approach is proposed with row penalties to find an IFS to a transportation problem. The new method is illustrated with a numerical example. A comparative study on a set of benchmark instances shows that the new method provides the same or better initial feasible solution to all the problems except one. Thus, our new method can be considered as an alternative technique of attaining an initial feasible solution to a transportation problem.