A Fuzzy Approch for Finding Initial Solution for Transportation Problem

Abstract Transportation models have wide applications in logistics and supply chain for reducing the cost but the availability, need and unit cost of transportation may not be certain known in real-time applications. Fuzzy numbers are the name given to these ambiguous data. In this study, we investigate a balanced fuzzy transportation problem where the availabilities, requirements and the transportation costs are all triangular fuzzy numbers. In the initial stage, triangular numbers are transformed into crisp numbers using the ranking approach. The Initial Basic Feasible Solution is then obtained in the second step by using several approaches such as the North-West Corner Rule, Least Cost Method and Vogel’s Approximation Method. An example in which IBFS is obtained for a transportation problem with fuzzy numbers is presented at the end of the research.