Optimizing agricultural transportation: advancing the 'transportation problem' towards intelligent solutions

Ensuring food security has always been one of the main priorities of human society. This problem is more pronounced today. Studies show that most food products are spoiled during transportation. This once again clearly demonstrates how urgent the issue of optimizing the transportation of food products is. A number of studies, articles and important results are found in the scientific literature aimed at solving the problem of optimizing transportation. The object of research in the presented article is the transportation of food products. The article proposes a solution to the problem of eliminating the imbalance between the production and demand of agricultural products. The issue is solved by bringing it to the “Transportation issue”. First of all, the amount of products produced by the farmers and the demand for products by region are determined. In the second stage, a cost table is compiled to determine the transportation costs between production points and demand points. After that, the first possible transportation plan is compiled using the North-West corner method. The optimality of the plan is checked. If the plan is not optimal, the next possible plan is compiled. The number of possible plans is found and it is explained that this problem is impossible to solve manually. For this purpose, a list of programs in the Python algorithmic language is presented to find the optimal placement plan more quickly. The presented method is useful in solving the transportation problem, but can also be applied in other areas of agriculture. Thus, the presented method can be applied to eliminate the possible imbalance between the mineral and fertilizer needs of soil and plants for productivity management.