Transportation and Assignment Problem:
Transportation problem is the problem of determining the minimum cost for allocating a product from several supply sources to several destinations. For example a cold drink manufacturing company has say four plants located in four different cities and the total production of these four plants is absorbed by four shops located in different cities an d if we are to determine a transportation schedule that minimizes the total cost of transporting cold drinks form different plant locations to various shops then it is a case of transportation problem. A simplified version of the simple method talked about in case of linear programming can be used in solving such problems and this simplified version is often known as the transportation algorithm. At times this is also known as the transportation methods or the distribution methods.