A novel approximation method to obtain initial basic feasible solution of transportation problem

The transportation problem is one of the important problems in the field of optimization. It is related to finding the minimum cost transportation plan for moving to a certain number of demand points from a certain number of sources. Various methods for solving this problem have been included in the literature. These methods are usually developed for an initial solution or optimal solution. In this study, a novel method to find the initial solution to the transportation problem is proposed. This new method called Karagul-Sahin Approximation Method was compared with six initial solution methods in the literature using twenty-four test problems. Compared to other methods, the proposed method has obtained the best initial solution to 17 of these problems with remarkable calculation times. In conclusion, the solutions obtained by the proposed method are as good as the solutions obtained with Vogel's approach and as fast as the Northwest Corner Method.