A fuzzy DEA approach on the extended transportation problem

Abstract

The transportation problem is a part of supply chain management. It aims to minimise the cost of transportation. The existing methods to obtain the optimal solution of the transportation problem either use only a single attribute or multiple attributes with crisp data. In solving real-life transportation problems, we often face the state of uncertainty in data, as well as numerous attributes to find out the optimal transportation plan. In this study, the fuzzy DEA approach has been utilised on the extended transportation problem to solve both limitations, as mentioned above. In the present work, the DEA model has been used to handle the problem of multiple attributes, while fuzzy is integrated with the DEA model to overcome the difficulties which arose due to uncertainty in data. A numerical example has been explained to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed study. The results obtained by the proposed model are comparable with the result obtained by Amirteimoori (2011) for the crisp extended transportation problem.