An alternate approach to solve two-level hierarchical time minimization transportation problem

This paper discusses a two-level hierarchical time minimization transportation problem, which is an important class of transportation problems arising in industries. This problem has been studied by various researchers (Sharma et al. in Eur J Oper Res 246:700-707, 2015; Sonia and Puri in TOP 12(2):301-330, 2004; Xie et al. in Comput Oper Res 86:124-139, 2017) and therefore, a number of polynomial time iterative algorithms are available to find its solution. All the existing algorithms, though efficient, have some shortcomings. The current study proposes an alternate solution algorithm for the problem that is more efficient in terms of computational time than the existing algorithms. The results justifying the underlying theory of the proposed algorithm are given. Further, a detailed comparison of the computational behaviour of all the algorithms for randomly generated instances of this problem, of different sizes validates the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.