Abstract—This paper develops two efficient heuristics to solve the single-source transportation problem, i.e. the special class of the transportation problem where each customer must be served by only one supplier. The proposed heuristics are both started by simplifying the problem into the simpler transportation problem where each customer requires exact one product lot. Then, the first heuristic solves the simplified problem using the transportation algorithm while the second heuristic solves it using the assignment algorithm. The heuristics return an optimal solution or a near-optimal solution for every benchmark instance.

Index Terms—Single-source transportation problem, assignment problem, transportation problem, heuristic.

Pisut Pongchairerks is with Production Engineering Program, Faculty of Engineering, Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand (email: pisut@tni.ac.th).

Cite: Pisut Pongchairerks, "Efficient Heuristics for Single-Source Transportation Problems," International Journal of Applied Physics and Mathematics vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 352-362, 2014.