A cost and pipeline trade-off in a transportation problem

Abstract

The present paper deals with a trade off between cost and pipeline at a given time in a transportation problem. The time lag between commissioning a project and the time when the last consignment of goods reaches the project site is an important factor. This motivates the study of a bi-criteria transportation problem at a pivotal time T. An exhaustive set E of all independent cost-pipeline pairs (called efficient pairs) at time T is constructed in such a way that each pair corresponds to a basic feasible solution and in turn, gives an optimal transportation schedule. A convergent algorithm has been proposed to determine non-dominated cost pipeline pairs in a criteria space instead of scanning the decision space, where the number of such pairs is large as compared to those found in the criteria space.

Keywords

• Transportation problem
• Combinatorial optimization
• Bottleneck transportation problem
• Bi-criteria transportation problem
• Efficient points