Transportation problems and assignment problems

Special computation techniques have been developed for certain types of linear programming problems that are widely used in mathematical modeling of real life situations. One of the most useful of these special purpose algorithms is transportation method. In a classical transportation problem the cost is minimized by selecting the optimal path for transporting goods from a set of origins to a set of destinations. Assignment method is a special case of more general transportation problem. A discussion of linear programming in general, theory supporting transportation method, methods of finding optimal solution, applications of transportation and assignment problems are presented. Transportation and assignment methods are found to offer significant computational efficiency over the simplex method for certain types of linear problems.