An efficient primal approach to bottleneck transportation problems

This article addresses bottleneck linear programming problems and in particular capacitated and constrained bottleneck transportation problems. A pseudopricing procedure based on the poly-ω procedure is used to facilitate the primal simplex procedure. This process allows the recent computational developments such as the Extended Threaded Index Method to be applied to bottleneck transportation problems. The impact on problem solution times is illustrated by computational testing and comparison with other current methods.     

Finding equivalent transportation formulations for constrained transportation problems

This paper describes a procedure for determining if constrained transportation problems (i.e., transportation problems with additional linear constraints) can be transformed into equivalent pure transportation problems by a linear transformation involving the node constraints and the extra constraints. Our results extend procedures for problems in which the extra constraints consist of bounding certain partial sums of variables.     

A streamlined simplex approach to the singly constrained transportation problem

A primal simplex procedure is developed to solve transportation problems with an arbitrary additional linear constraint. The approach is a specialization of the Double Reverse Method of Charnes and Cooper. Efficient procedures for pricing-out the basis, determining representations, and implementing the change of basis are presented. These procedures exploit the pure transportation substructure in such a manner that full advantage may be taken of the computational schemes and list structures used to store and update the basis in codifying the MODI method. Furthermore, the pricing-out and change-of-basis procedures are organized in a manner that permits the calculations for one to be utilized in the other. Computational results are presented which indicate that this method is at least 50 times faster than the state-of-the-art LP code, APEX-III. Methods for obtaining basic primal “feasible” starts and “good” feasible integer solutions are also presented.