Published Online:August 2026
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Operations Management
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJOM020726
DOI:10.71329/IUPJOM/2026.25.3.36-46
Author Name:Raju Prajapati and Om Prakash Dubey
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:36-46
The paper proposes a greedy heuristic based on Kruskal’s minimum spanning tree algorithm for solving a class of transshipment problems with transient nodes. The transshipment problems under consideration contain midway transient node(s), connections among sources, destinations and transient node(s), if applicable. Such transshipment problems could be expressed using a directed network. The directed transshipment network is first transformed into an undirected network, after which a spanning tree is generated and used for feasible flow allocation. The proposed method is evaluated against an exact minimum-cost network flow formulation. In the first test instance, the greedy solution achieves an optimal cost of 480 units, while in the second instance, it obtains a feasible cost of 3,500 units, compared with the optimal cost of 3,100 units, giving a gap of 12.90%. More test cases are also included to test the performance of the greedy approach. The results indicate that the proposed approach can provide quick feasible solutions, although optimality is not guaranteed. The paper also discusses strategies related to tie-breaking and future improvements for better solution quality.
Operations research contains various optimization tools for the optimization process. Optimization can be linear or nonlinear (Luenberger & Ye, 1984) depending on the nature of the problem under study.