An Efficient Approach for Transforming Unbalanced Transportation Problems into Balanced Problems in Order to Find Optimal Solutions
- 1 Department of Mathematics, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
- 2 Department of Mathematics, Uttara University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Abstract
In operations research, the transportation problem (TP) is among the earliest and most effective applications of the linear programming problem. Unbalanced transportation problems reflect the reality of supply chain and logistics situations where the available supply of goods may not precisely match the demand at different locations. To deal with an unbalanced transportation problem (UTP) , it is essential first to convert it into a balanced transportation problem (BTP) to find an initial basic feasible solution (IBFS) and hence the optimal solution. The present paper is concerned with introducing a new approach to convert an unbalanced transportation problem into a balanced one and as a consequence to obtain optimum total transportation cost. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the suggested method.
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