Abstract

Transportation problem has been one of the most important applications of Linear programming. Transportation problems have become vastly applied in industrial organizations with multiple manufacturing units, warehouses and distribution centers. In this stugy, the methods of finding initial basic feasible solution of balanced transportation problem are studied and compared to find among them the best in terms of efficiency. The initial basic feasible solution tableaus of all the methods are constructed using data collected from Katsina State Transport Authority. The costing of the allocated cells associated with the initial basic feasible solutions of the five methods are computed and compared with that of optimal solution which was found to be N1,098,000:00. It was observed that Vogel’s approximation method, Least-Cost method and Column minimum method yielded better starting solutions. The North-West Corner method and Row minimum methods though simple to compute yielded starting solutions far from the optimal solution. In addition, Vogel’s approximation method is more difficult and requires more iteration. The best transportation network for Katsina State Transport Authority was obtained.

Key words: Comparison, Transportation algorithms, Initial Basic Feasible Solution, Optimal solution, Linear programming solver