Trapezoidal Fuzzy Numbers for the Transportation Problem
This work addresses uncertainty in transportation problems for operations research, but it appears incremental as it extends existing fuzzy methods to trapezoidal numbers.
The paper tackles the transportation problem by using fuzzy trapezoidal numbers to handle uncertainty in cost values, ensuring an optimal solution exists for balanced cases, and applies fuzzy methods for initial and optimal solutions with a numerical example.
Transportation Problem is an important problem which has been widely studied in Operations Research domain. It has been often used to simulate different real life problems. In particular, application of this Problem in NP Hard Problems has a remarkable significance. In this Paper, we present the closed, bounded and non empty feasible region of the transportation problem using fuzzy trapezoidal numbers which ensures the existence of an optimal solution to the balanced transportation problem. The multivalued nature of Fuzzy Sets allows handling of uncertainty and vagueness involved in the cost values of each cells in the transportation table. For finding the initial solution of the transportation problem we use the Fuzzy Vogel Approximation Method and for determining the optimality of the obtained solution Fuzzy Modified Distribution Method is used. The fuzzification of the cost of the transportation problem is discussed with the help of a numerical example. Finally, we discuss the computational complexity involved in the problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on obtaining the solution of the transportation problem using fuzzy trapezoidal numbers.