On the pure fixed charge transportation problem

Abstract

The pure fixed charge transportation problem is a well-known variant of the classic transportation problem where the cost of sending goods from a source to a destination only equals a fixed charge, regardless of the flow quantity. The objective is to minimize the total cost of shipping available goods to meet the required demands. Hence, we first demonstrate that this problem is NP-hard even when there are only two destinations, and it is Strong NP-hard when the number of destinations is input. These two new complexity results are an important supplement to the previous complexity results of this problem. Then, we propose two simple but novel approximation algorithms with a constant worst-case ratio, which is proved using an integer convex optimization model. Although our approximation algorithm applies to a few destinations, to our knowledge, it is the first approximation algorithm to handle the pure fixed-charge transportation problem.