Dynamic Optimization of Sunflower Transportation in Iran

Transportation plays an important role in excessive costs and the price of final goods. For this reason, constructing an economic transportation model enables us to optimize various activities in transportation systems for agriculture products. This brings lower costs for consumers of products. The main objective of this study is to construct a dynamic linear programming transportation model in order to minimize the transportation costs of sunflower shipped from various supply regions to several pressing oil factories. There are 40 production centers as supply origins, and 7 factories as demanding centers for sunflower seeds in Iran. This study used the monthly data in 2004 based on the capacities of origin supplies, warehouse (and related monthly stock available in previous period and the amount of transferred shipment to next period), monthly consumption of demanding centers and related transportation costs. LINGO computer package was applied to solve the transportation model. Based on the comparison of optimal solutions of the model and the actual transformation costs, the transformation cost reductions for sunflower seeds was 436 million Rials that is 11.8 percent of the total transportation costs over the year.