The paper models the shipment of bauxite of
Ghana Bauxite Company Limited(GBC) from the
various sources of production to the various
destinations as mixedtransportation problem. The
paper studies the work done by Mondal et al (2012)and
Mondal and Hossain (2012) in which the MVAM
technique was used as solutionmethod. The original
inequality constraints arrangement was mmodified to
obtainedvariants of inequality arrangement for the
same data set from Ghana Bauxite Company Limited.
Again, the inequality arrangements in Mondal et al
(2012) was givendifferent arrangement in each of the
data sets with different inequality arrangement.In each
case, we obtained the same solution for each variant of
the inequality arrangements, first for the data set of
Ghana Bauxite Company Limited, second forthe data
set of Mondal et al (2012). In addition, the standard
technique of solvingthe TP using MODI method with
North West Corner method was applied on GBCdata
set and the solution obtained previously also repeated.
It is then concludedthat the formulation of the mixed
transportation problem does not ddifferentiatebetween
order of arrangement of the inequalities on a data set
and therefore theMVAM solution method is not unique
for ddifferent arrangement of inequalities onthe data
set. In addition, the standard method of solution was
also found to havethe same solution. However, the
advantage of the MVAM is that, it is simple to use,it is
also faster due to less number of iteration. It does not
involve the problem ofdegeneracy as compared to the
standard method.
Keywords :
Transportation problem, Mixed inequality constraint, Modified Vogel'sApproximation Method (MVAM), North-west Corner Method, MODI Method.