Vr. Prasad et al., A GENERALIZED TIME-COST TRADE-OFF TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM, The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44(12), 1993, pp. 1243-1248
Citations number
7
Categorie Soggetti
Management,"Operatione Research & Management Science","Operatione Research & Management Science
In the classical transportation problem if the unit costs and transpor
tation durations are considered, the time-cost trade-off solutions can
be determined by the well-known threshold approach assuming that all
the transportations are permitted to be simultaneous in time. If all t
he unit costs are linear functions of time over a specified interval o
f time, a parametric technique can be applied for identifying all the
time-cost trade-off solutions pertaining to this interval. In this pap
er, the unit costs considered are piece-wise linear non-increasing fun
ctions of time and transportations are allowed to be simultaneous. It
is shown that a parametric method involving a finite sequence of param
etric transportation problems reveals all the time-cost trade-off solu
tions of this generalized trade-off problem. Computational experience
is included. If the transportation problem has considerable degeneracy
, the parametric approach may pose some computational difficulty. This
difficulty can be reduced by using an alternative method involving th
e bicriteria optimization approach of Aneja and Nair. Also, a direct m
ethod is outlined for the case where a finite set of discrete alternat
ives of unit cost-time pairs is available.