Exam 24: Transportation Models

A transportation problem with 8 sources and 6 destinations will have an optimal solution that uses at most 13 of the 48 possible routes.

The elements of a transportation problem that supply goods are referred to as ________.

A firm has established a distribution network for the supply of a raw material critical to its manufacturing.Currently there are two origins for this raw material,which must be shipped to three manufacturing plants.The current network has the following characteristics: The firm has identified two potential sites for a third raw material source; these are identified as Candidate A and Candidate B.From A,the costs to ship would be $9 to Plant 1,$10 to Plant 2,and $12 to Plant 3.From B,these costs would be $11,$14,and $8.The new source,wherever it is located,will have a capacity of 500 units.Solve with the transportation method.Which site should be selected?

The transportation model is an excellent tool for minimizing shipping costs among existing facilities,but it is not useful when firms consider new facility locations.

A transportation problem has an optimal solution when:

The transportation method is a special case of the family of problems known as what?

To handle degeneracy,a very small quantity is placed in one of the unused squares.

Consider the transportation data set for a minimization problem below. a.Calculate the initial solution using the northwest-corner rule. b.Calculate improvement indices,iterate,and solve for the optimal shipping pattern.

In a transportation problem,degeneracy means that:

Find the minimum cost solution for the transportation problem detailed in the table below.Explain carefully the meaning of any quantity in a "dummy" row or column.

Upon completion of the northwest-corner rule,which source-destination cell is guaranteed to be occupied?

The Shamrock Transportation Company has four terminals: A,B,C,and D.At the start of a particular day,there are 8,8,6,and 3 tractors available at those terminals,respectively.During the previous night,trailers were loaded at plants R,S,T,and U.The number of trailers at each plant is 2,12,5,and 6,respectively.The company dispatcher has determined the distances between each terminal and each plant,as follows.How many tractors should be dispatched from each terminal to each plant in order to minimize the total number of miles traveled?

For the data below,construct an initial feasible solution using the northwest-corner rule.

The stepping-stone method:

In a minimization problem,a positive improvement index in a cell indicates that:

Total demand for a transportation model is 15 while total supply is 20.Which of the following should be included?

A manufacturer of semiconductor "wafers" has been attempting to convert its operations to practices more in keeping with JIT principles.The firm is now paying much more attention to the transit time between one processing stage and the next.The plant has a somewhat haphazard pattern of machine locations,partly because the machines were purchased and installed at different times,partly from a shortage of floor space,and partly from previous experiments with work cells.The bottom line is this: there are four machines that perform a certain processing phase,and three machines that perform the next phase.All units of a large class of wafers go through these two phases.The table below displays the transit time,in minutes,from each machine of the first phase to each machine of the second.Machine 3 is not really 100 minutes away from machine B; the company has prohibited that combination because of quality problems associated with that specific pairing.Supply and demand quantities are in wafers processed per week.Develop a transit time minimizing solution for this firm.What is the total transit time of this solution? Which machines are fully utilized? Which machines have some capacity unused or requirements unfilled? Was the prohibition on the 3-B combination honored?

A transportation problem has a feasible solution when:

The main difference between the intuitive lowest-cost method and the northwest-corner rule is that:

A transportation problem has improvement indices of 5,4,0,and -3.Which of the following is always true?