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Concept
Transportation theory (mathematics)
Summary
In mathematics and economics, transportation theory or transport theory is a name given to the study of optimal transportation and allocation of resources. The problem was formalized by the French mathematician Gaspard Monge in 1781.
In the 1920s A.N. Tolstoi was one of the first to study the transportation problem mathematically. In 1930, in the collection Transportation Planning Volume I for the National Commissariat of Transportation of the Soviet Union, he published a paper "Methods of Finding the Minimal Kilometrage in Cargo-transportation in space".
Major advances were made in the field during World War II by the Soviet mathematician and economist Leonid Kantorovich. Consequently, the problem as it is stated is sometimes known as the Monge–Kantorovich transportation problem. The linear programming formulation of the transportation problem is also known as the Hitchcock–Koopmans transportation problem.
Suppose that we have a collection of m mines mining iron ore, and a collection of n factories which use the iron ore that the mines produce. Suppose for the sake of argument that these mines and factories form two disjoint subsets M and F of the Euclidean plane R2. Suppose also that we have a cost function c : R2 × R2 → [0, ∞), so that c(x, y) is the cost of transporting one shipment of iron from x to y. For simplicity, we ignore the time taken to do the transporting. We also assume that each mine can supply only one factory (no splitting of shipments) and that each factory requires precisely one shipment to be in operation (factories cannot work at half- or double-capacity). Having made the above assumptions, a transport plan is a bijection T : M → F.
In other words, each mine m ∈ M supplies precisely one target factory T(m) ∈ F and each factory is supplied by precisely one mine.
We wish to find the optimal transport plan, the plan T whose total cost
is the least of all possible transport plans from M to F. This motivating special case of the transportation problem is an instance of the assignment problem.
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