A new approach for solving fuzzy maximal flow problems

Abstract

In conventional maximal flow problems, it is assumed that decision maker is certain about the flows between different nodes. But in real life situations, there always exist uncertainty about the flows between different nodes. In such cases, the flows may be represented by fuzzy numbers. In literature, there are several methods to solve such type of problems. Till now, no one has used ranking function to solve above type of problems. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to find fuzzy maximal flow between source and sink by using ranking function. To illustrate the algorithm a numerical example is solved and result is explained. If there is no uncertainty about the flow between source and sink then the proposed algorithm gives the same result as in crisp maximal flow problems. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.