A NEW APPROACH TO FIND THE INITIAL BASIC FEASIBLE SOLUTION OF A TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM

Transportation problem (TP) in operations research is a widely used optimization technique to study the problems concerned with transporting goods from production places to sale points. The TP may have one or more objectives such as minimization of transportation cost, minimization of distance with respect to time, and so on. There is a systematic method to solve such problems. For this, we find the Initial Basic Feasible Solution (IBFS) to the given problem. North West corner method, least cost method, Vogel's approximation method are the standard methods one uses to find the IBFS. In recent years, there are several other methods are proposed to solve such problems. In this paper, we propose a new technique named as Direct Sum Method (DSM) and its effectiveness is compared with the standard methods. The result shows that it is easy to compute and near to the optimum solution of the problem.