Abstract
This study is concerned with an efficient algorithm for shipping parts between two factories, each located in a different country. In most cases such a part transportation utilizes liner vessels where multiple liners are operated for each line. The minimum transportation time of parts can be obtained by using some of those vessels. The problem can reduce to the linear integer programming problem by discarding those liners that are unnecessary for the optimal solution. Further the linear programming (LP) with integral constraints relaxed finds the optimal integer solution because of totally unimodular matrix of the LP. In this article, however, we developed an efficient O (N2) algorithm where N denotes the number of liner vessels. It is found from a computational comparison of our algorithm and LP that the former is extremely faster than the latter, and the time difference increases with the number of liner vessels and the amount of parts to be shipped.
