A dual-matrix approach to the transportation problem

The transportation model is a special case of linear programming models, widely used in the areas of inventory control, employment scheduling, aggregate planning, and personnel assignment, among others. Due to its special structure, the stepping-stone method is commonly adopted in order to improve the computational efficiency instead of the regular simplex method. This paper proposes a new approach, the dual-matrix approach, to solve the transportation problem. The dual-matrix approach is very efficient in terms of computation. The algorithm of this approach is presented, and explained briefly as the regular simplex method and the stepping-stone method. Finally, a numerical example is described in the paper to show its efficiency.