Classic Transportation Problems

In this Chapter, a brief introduction into classical transportation problems underlying logistics engineering is presented. A broad range of the major classical transportation problems has been included in this Chapter although the list may still not be complete. These problems can rarely be employed in their generic form to solve practical problems of logistics engineering, but still they constitute building blocks for modeling real life problems. For each type of problem, a verbal de¯nition of the problem in its generic form is given followed by some extensions of the generic form and by possible application areas in practice. For some of the problems, a mathematical formulation is also provided. These problems have been investigated for some time now particularly by the Operations Research community and thus a rich body of solution procedures exists. Due to space limitations, only one or a few representative solution approaches have been included here for each problem type. The Chapter concludes with a case describing the distribution operations at a central warehouse in a major Turkish retail chain.