The Fixed-Charge Transportation Problem (FCTP) is an extension of the classical transportation problem. It considers a fixed charge (or a fixed cost) and a transportation cost per unit transported associated with each route. The presence of the fixed cost in the objective function makes the problem difficult to solve, thereby requiring the use of heuristic methods. In this paper, simple heuristic algorithms are proposed, and their performances are compared with the existing best method by making use of benchmark problem instances. Copyright © 2009, Inderscience Publishers.

Chandrasekharan Rajendran

Department of Management Studies

K. Antony Arokia Durai Raj

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Fast heuristic algorithms to solve a single-stage Fixed-Charge Transportation Problem

International Journal of Operational Research

Concerns over environmental degradation, legislative requirements and growing needs of business have fueled the growth of Closed Loop Supply Chains (CLSC). We consider a CLSC and address the issues of designing the network and of optimizing the distribution. Four variants of the problem are considered. The problem is modeled as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). We develop a constructive heuristic based on Vogel's approximation method-total opportunity cost method to provide good initial solutions to a priority-based simulated annealing heuristic, to accelerate its convergence. Trials on a set of hypothetical datasets have yielded encouraging results. The methodology is also tested using a case study data of a company producing electronic products. Implications for sustainability are discussed. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Applied Soft Computing Journal

PRISM: PRIority based SiMulated annealing for a closed loop supply chain network design problem

Transportation of goods in a supply chain from plants to customers through distribution centers (DCs) is modeled as a two-stage distribution problem in the literature. In this paper we propose genetic algorithms to solve a two-stage transportation problem with two different scenarios. The first scenario considers the per-unit transportation cost and the fixed cost associated with a route, coupled with unlimited capacity at every DC. The second scenario considers the opening cost of a distribution center, per-unit transportation cost from a given plant to a given DC and the per-unit transportation cost from the DC to a customer. Subsequently, an attempt is made to represent the two-stage fixed-charge transportation problem (Scenario-1) as a single-stage fixed-charge transportation problem and solve the resulting problem using our genetic algorithm. Many benchmark problem instances are solved using the proposed genetic algorithms and performances of these algorithms are compared with the respective best existing algorithms for the two scenarios. The results from computational experiments show that the proposed algorithms yield better solutions than the respective best existing algorithms for the two scenarios under consideration. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

Computers and Operations Research

A genetic algorithm for solving the fixed-charge transportation model: Two-stage problem

European Journal of Operational Research

A genetic algorithm for the two-stage supply chain distribution problem associated with a fixed charge

Omega

On step fixed-charge transportation problem

Computers & Industrial Engineering

Nonlinear fixed charge transportation problem by spanning tree-based genetic algorithm

More-for-less algorithm for fixed-charge transportation problems

A hybrid random-key genetic algorithm for a symmetric travelling salesman problem

Journal	International Journal of Operational Research
ISSN	17457645
Open Access	No