Farzad Pargar - Department of Industrial Engineering, Mazandaran University of Science and Technology, Babol, Iran
Nikbakhsh Javadian
Adel Pourramzan Ganji

This paper presents a heuristic for obtaining an initial solution for the transportation problem that called Maximum Demand (MD). The importance of determining efficient solutions for large sized transportation problems is borne out by many practical problems in industries, the military, etc. With this motivation, we develop MD method to obtain fast and efficient solutions. Computational experiments were carried out to Comparison the findings obtained by the new heuristic and the best method known in literature that is basic version of Vogel's approximation method (VAM) coupled with total opportunity cost (called the VAM-TOC), that tabulated for 640 examples. Superior performance of the new heuristic over those methods is discussed in terms of total costs obtained, Number of times that MD resulted in an initial total cost which is less than to that obtained by VAMTOC and CPU time required to solve the problems. Experimental design aspects are also presented.

heuristic, Vogel's approximation method, total opportunity cost, computational experiments, Transportation problem