A linear-time algorithm for the bottleneck transportation problem with a fixed number of sources

We investigate a special case of the bottleneck transportation problem where the number s of sources is bounded by a constant and not part of the input. For the subcase s=2, a best-possible linear-time algorithm has been derived by Varadarajan. In this note we show that for any fixed number s⩾1, the bottleneck transportation problem with s sources can be solved in linear-time. The algorithm is conceptually simple, and easy to implement.