Computational experience with exterior point algorithms for the transportation problem

An experimental computational study to compare the classical primal simplex algorithm and the exterior point algorithms for the transportation problem (TP) is presented. Totally, four algorithms are compared on uniformly randomly generated test problems. The results are very encouraging for one of the competitive algorithms. In particular, a dual forest exterior point algorithm is on average up to 4.5 times faster than network simplex algorithm on TPs of size 300 × 300 and for all classes. This result leads into corresponding savings in computational time. From the computational performance we conclude that as the problem size increases, exterior point algorithm get relatively faster.