SOLVING TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM OF A CAPSULE MANUFACTURER USING PHEROMONE OPTIMIZER AND A HYBRID OF KRUSKAL’S METHOD AND THE NORTHWEST CORNER METHOD

Associated Capsules is a well known manufacturer of capsules, which provides the same to many pharmaceutical companies based in India. They use the help of Swift Transportation Pvt. Ltd., a transportation company, to transport these capsules to different parts of Western India. They use one truck, a large one at that, to transport this. Transportation is a very costly affair. The transportation model is a special class of the linear programming problem. It deals with the situation in which a commodity is shipped from sources to destinations. The objective is to be determined the amounts shipped from each source to each destination that minimize the total shipping cost while satisfying both the supply limit and the demand requirements. The model assumes that the shipping cost on a given route is directly proportional to the number of units shipped on that route. In general, the transportation model can be extended to areas other than the direct transportation of a commodity, including among others, inventory control, employment scheduling and personnel assignment. So it is very competitive and difficult situation to make a vital decision. This situation can be represented numerically in the form of a Linear Programming Model. Linear Programming is used worldwide for optimizing profit problem. It is a method to achieve the best outcome (Max profit at low cost) whose requirement is represented by linear relationships. We have used novel techniques named the Pheromone optimizer and a hybrid of Kruskal's Method and Northwest Corner Method to solve this problem. In the former method, every neighbouring node is given a scent value and a fade value and the path so chosen is one with the most scent value. In the hybrid method, a minimum spanning tree is constructed and then the Northwest corner method is used Results obtained were positive, with savings of rupees 45,000 in transportation costs and fuel amount for the pheromone optimizer and ____________ for the hybrid method.