This project was a school assignment where we were told to code an application that can calculate the transportation cost using three optimization algorithms (NorthWest Corner, Least Cost, and Balas-Hammer algorithm).
Imagine you’re the owner of a factory that specializes in a certain product. Like any other business owner, your goal is to maximize profit, and the way to that is to optimize the various processes involved in production as much as possible. One of these processes being the transportation of that said product from your factory to a number of warehouses or customers, with the objective being to fully satisfy the destination requirements within the operating production capacity constraints at the minimum possible cost.
But still, looking at it this way doesn't capture the difficulty of this problem that well, so now let's take this even a step further and say instead of one, you own multiple factories, with the cost of shipping from each one of them to each destination being different and known. How would you go about minimizing the cost of transportation in this case ?
What I just described to you is known as the transportation problem. It is a special class of linear programming that deals with shipping commodities from sources to destinations. The objective of the transportation problem is to determine the shipping schedule that minimizes the total shipping cost while satisfying supply and demand limits. The transportation problem has an application in industry, communication networks, planning, scheduling, transportation and allotment etc.
Luckily for us, this problem has already been worked on and there are some algorithms and methods that you can use to help lower the transportation cost. In this project, we chose to address three main algorithms, which I won't go too deep into, but I'd recommend checking them out if you’re interested.
- NorthWest Corner
- Least Cost
- Balas-Hammer
(You can find the code for these algorithms in the algorithms folder)
After installing the required packages, start by downloading and extracting the "Projet-SCM" zip file from the latest release here.
Upon running the "main.py" script you'll be met with this simple, self explanatory window:
In the top section you can see a customizable table where you can set the transportation cost between each source and each destination.
After matching the values of the table to your problem, the next step is to solve it using one of the three methods, which you can do by just pressing the button with the name of your desired method.
the solution will appear in the bottom section as shown in the example below.
You can view the first five iterations using the "show iterations" button at the bottom.
(I chose to limit the number of displayed iterations to 5)