Lagrangian Relaxation Method for the Step fixed-charge Transportation Problem

In this paper, a step fixed charge transportation problem is developed where the products are sent from the sources to the destinations in existence of both unit and step fixed-charges. The proposed model determines the amount of products in the existing routes with the aim of minimizing the total cost (sum of unit and step fixed-charges) to satisfy the demand of each customer. As the problem is NP-hard, a moderate sized instance of this problem becomes intractable for general-purpose solvers. In order to overcome this difficulty, a Lagrangian relaxation approach is proposed. The computational experiments show that the Lagrangian relaxation algorithm is able to solve large sized problems with optimality gap compared to general-purpose solvers.