What is a transportation problem in operations research?

What is a transportation problem in operations research?

• A. A scheduling problem for projects
• B. A problem of routing vehicles to minimize distance
• C. A linear programming problem that minimizes the cost of shipping goods from suppliers to consumers while meeting supply and demand constraints
• D. A problem of maximizing profits in a single plant

Answer: (C)

The main idea is to model shipping quantities from several suppliers to several customers in a way that minimizes total shipping cost while respecting how much each supplier can provide and how much each customer must receive. You’d set decision variables for how much to ship from each supplier to each customer, then minimize the total cost of all shipments. The constraints ensure you don’t exceed each supplier’s available supply and you meet each customer’s demand (with nonnegativity for all shipments). When total supply equals total demand, the supply and demand constraints become equalities, which is the classic transportation problem. This matches the description of a linear programming problem that minimizes the cost of shipping goods from suppliers to consumers while meeting supply and demand constraints. The other options describe different kinds of problems—scheduling, routing with vehicle paths, or maximizing profits in a single plant—which don’t capture the multi-origin, multi-destination shipping with cost and balance constraints.

The main idea is to model shipping quantities from several suppliers to several customers in a way that minimizes total shipping cost while respecting how much each supplier can provide and how much each customer must receive. You’d set decision variables for how much to ship from each supplier to each customer, then minimize the total cost of all shipments. The constraints ensure you don’t exceed each supplier’s available supply and you meet each customer’s demand (with nonnegativity for all shipments). When total supply equals total demand, the supply and demand constraints become equalities, which is the classic transportation problem.

This matches the description of a linear programming problem that minimizes the cost of shipping goods from suppliers to consumers while meeting supply and demand constraints. The other options describe different kinds of problems—scheduling, routing with vehicle paths, or maximizing profits in a single plant—which don’t capture the multi-origin, multi-destination shipping with cost and balance constraints.