As you study the material in this chapter, keep in mind that the steps of the transportation
algorithm are precisely those of the simplex method. Another point is that
the transportation algorithm was developed in the early days of OR to enhance hand
computations. Now, with the tremendous power of the computer, such shortcuts may
not be warranted and, indeed, are never used in commercial codes in the strict manner
presented in this chapter. Nevertheless, the presentation shows that the special transportation
tableau is useful in modeling a class of problems in a concise manner (as opposed
to the familiar LP model with explicit objective function and constraints). In
particular, the transportation tableau format simplifies the solution of the problem by
Excel Solver. The representation also provides interesting ideas about how the basic
theory of linear programming is exploited to produce shortcuts in computations