Tiebreaker Vogel’s Approximation Method, a Systematic Approach to improve the Initial Basic Feasible Solution of Transportation Problems

We propose a new algorithm that breaks ties in the allocation decision making process and improves the performance of the standard Vogel’s approximation method (VAM). The proposed algorithm named as Tiebreaker VAM (TBVAM) uses the maximum mean of the costs to break ties. A comparative study on a set of 35 benchmark transportation problems from published literature were evaluated to verify the effectiveness of this method. The results show that TBVAM has produced, on average, better solutions than VAM and more optimal solutions. In this paper, the TBVAM average cost was 77301, whereas for VAM it was 77320. The advantages of TBVAM are that, on average, it provides a lower total cost than VAM and it requires only simple logical calculations that are cheap to compute easy to understand and to apply by using maximum mean costs.