The Transportation Problem is one of the classical problems in Operations
Research. The development of more powerful personal computers in the past
years made it possible to solve larger problems, creating huge opportunities of
applications. The MODI method is the most cited method in the literature to solve
the Transportation Problem. This method requires an initial basic feasible solution
and for this purpose the literature often presents the Northwest Corner Rule, the
Lest Cost Method and the Vogel Method. This paper aims to study these three
different methods and analyze the number of iterations necessary to reach the
optimal solution when they are used.