Optimization approach to transportation solution: Comparative study using nanocomputational technique

Abstract

Transportation problems are considered one of the most important applications of operations research because they contribute to minimizing transportation costs and improving resource allocation between supply and demand centers. Recently, nano-computational approaches and nano-inspired optimization techniques have attracted attention due to their efficiency in handling complex optimization problems with high accuracy and speed. This paper presents a new nano-enhanced approach for finding the minimum transportation cost using four transportation methods: the Northwest Corner Method (NWCM), Northeast Corner Method (NECM), Southwest Corner Method (SWCM), and Southeast Corner Method (SECM). The proposed nano-optimization strategy depends on selecting the minimum transportation cost from source to demand regardless of its location in the transportation matrix. The obtained results are compared with the classical transportation methods using several numerical examples solved by the WinQSB program. The experimental results demonstrate that the nano-enhanced approach provides lower transportation costs and improves computational efficiency compared with the ordinary methods. Furthermore, the NWCM combined with the nano-optimization strategy achieved the best performance in most test examples.