Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management, Twelfth Edition

Developing an Initial Solution

LO C.1 Develop an initial solution to a transportation model with the northwest-corner and intuitive lowest-cost methods

Once the data are arranged in tabular form, we must establish an initial feasible solution to the problem. A number of different methods have been developed for this step. We now discuss two of them, the northwest-corner rule and the intuitive lowest-cost method.

The Northwest-Corner Rule

The northwest-corner rule requires that we start in the upper-left-hand cell (or northwest corner) of the table and allocate units to shipping routes as follows:

Northwest-corner rule

A procedure in the transportation model where one starts at the upper-left-hand cell of a table (the northwest corner) and ...