Statistical Methods for Solving Transportation Problems

Abstract

Transportation problem is one of the models of Linear Programming problem. It deals with the situation in which a commodity from several sources is shipped to different destinations with the main objective to minimize the total shipping cost. There are three well-known methods namely, North West Corner Method Least Cost Method, Vogel’s Approximation Method to find the initial basic feasible solution of a transportation problem. In this paper, we present some statistical methods for finding the initial basic feasible solution. We use three statistical tools: arithmetic and harmonic mean and median. We present numerical examples, and we compare these results with other classical methods.