Supose that a company XYZ supplies its four retail outlets through its four plants. The following table provides the shipping cost per shipment (in TRY) from each plant to each retail outlet. Unit shipping cost Retail Outlet 1 2 3 4 1 500 600 400 200 2 200 900 100 300 Plant 3 300 400 200 100 4 200 100 300 200 Plants 1, 2, 3, and 4 make 10, 20, 20, and 10 shipments per month, respectively. Retail outlets 1, 2, 3, and 4 require 20, 10, 10, and 20 shipments per month, respectively. You are asked to determine the best plan for how many shipments to send from each plant to the respective retail outlets each month, considering the objective of minimizing the total shipping cost. a) Formulate this problem as a transportation problem by constructing the appropriate parameter table. b) Use the northwest corner rule to construct an initial BF solution. c) Starting with the initial basic solution from part (b), apply the transportation simplex method to obtain an optimal solution.
