Year
1999
Paper Type
Master's Thesis
College
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree Name
Master of Science in Mathematical Sciences (MS)
Department
Mathematics & Statistics
First Advisor
Dr. Adel Boules
Second Advisor
Dr. Champak Panchal
Third Advisor
Dr. Mei-Qin Zhan
Abstract
The transportation problem is a special type of linear program in which the objective is to minimize the total cost of shipping a single commodity from a number of sources (m) to a number of destinations or sinks (n).
Because of the special structure of the transportation problem, a special algorithm can be designed to find an optimal solution efficiently. Due to the large amount of information in the problem, judicious storage and management of the data are essential requirements of any viable implementation of the transportation algorithm.
Using sparse matrix techniques to store the solution array, and a rooted tree as the labeling method for handling the associated information provides a viable method to solve the transportation problem.
A difficult test problem was designed to test the computer program and demonstrate its efficiency. We were able to successfully implement the transportation algorithm for problems involving one million possible shipping routes. The FORTRAN code developed is included, as well as the results of several runs of the test problem.
Suggested Citation
Sustarsic, Alissa Michele, "An Efficient Implementation of the Transportation Problem" (1999). UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 81.
https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/81