Solving the Fixed Charge Transportation Problem by New Heuristic Approach

The fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP) is a deployment of the classical transportation problem in which a fixed cost is incurred, independent of the amount transported, along with a variable cost that is proportional to the amount shipped. Since the problem is considered as an NP-hard, the computational time grows exponentially as the size of the problem increases. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic along with well-known metaheuristic like Genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA) and recently developed one, Keshtel algorithm (KA) to solve the FCTP. Contrary to previous works, we develop a simple and strong heuristic according to the nature of the problem and compare the result with metaheuristics. In addition, since the researchers recently used the priority-based representation to encode the transportation graphs and achieved very good results, we consider this representation in metaheuristics and compare the results with the proposed heuristic. Furthermore, we apply the Taguchi experimental design method to set the proper values of algorithms in order to improve their performances. Finally, computational results of heuristic and metaheuristics with different encoding approaches, both in terms of the solution quality and computation time, are studied in different problem sizes