An Empirical Study on Multi-objective Transportation Problem in Fuzzy Environment

Abstract

For both in economical and social development of country transportation system plays a vital role. As it is directly involved with financial growth of the country, for that a complete well planned transportation infrastructure is necessary. Most of the transportation models are formulated with minimization of transportation cost as the basic objective. But consideration of transportation system with a single objective is not able to meet the various requirements of transportation industry for which it may not lead to the practical optimal solution. It bounds the decision makers (DMs) to consider several objectives at a time instead of single objective. To handle a multi-objective transportation problem with fixed parameters is a challenging issue; rather it is easy to consider all parameters in terms of linguistic variables. In this paper, a multi criteria multi-objective transportation models is formulated based on fuzzy relations under the fuzzy logic with several objectives like (i) minimization of total transportation cost and (ii) minimization of total transportation time. Another objective, maximization of the transported amount from a source to a destination is determined on the basis of previous two objectives. All the objectives are associated with multiple numbers of criteria like breakable items, shipping distance, service charge, mode of transportation etc. These relations are imprecise in nature and represented in terms of verbal words such as low, medium, high and very high. The fuzzy rule based multi-objective transportation problem is formulated and result is discussed.