In this paper, we consider the fixed-cost transportation problem. This problem is known to be NP-hard. Therefore, various heuristic and metaheuristic approaches have been proposed to find an approximate optimal solution. In this paper, we propose three hybrid algorithms that combine the ideas of metaheuristic and heuristic approaches in different ways. Two of the proposed algorithms consist of the sequential implementation of metaheuristic and heuristic algorithms, while the third one is a full hybrid algorithm designed by completely intertwining these two approaches. Experimental results on medium-size problems show that our proposed full hybrid algorithm provides approximately a 5\% improvement over metaheuristic algorithms and a 4\% improvement over heuristic algorithms. In addition, the improvement ratio increases as the size of the problem increases.
transportation problem, fixed charge transportation problem, genetic algorithms, metaheuristic algorithms
90C08, 90B06, 90C59, 90C10