Int. J. Industrial and Systems Engineering, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2018 193 Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. New heuristic to generate an initial basic feasible solution for the balanced transportation problem Youssef Harrath* and Jihene Kaabi College of Information Technology, University of Bahrain, P.O. Box 32038, Kingdom of Bahrain Email: yharrath@uob.edu.bh Email: jkaapi@uob.edu.bh *Corresponding author Abstract: This paper studied the balanced transportation problem. Many algorithms were developed to solve optimally this problem. The most commonly used method is the modified distribution method (MODI). The MODI algorithm starts by generating an initial basic feasible solution using the northwest corner method (NCM). In general, the cost of the initial basic feasible solution generated by NCM is too high and far away from the optimal cost. For this reason, we propose in this paper a new method to generate an initial basic feasible solution to the balanced transportation problem to solve this issue. This method, named Global Minimum Method (GMM), was tested and compared with the NCM, the minimum cost method (MCM), the Vogel’s approximation method (VAM), and the optimal cost obtained by MODI. The computational results proved that the new heuristic is promising for small size instances and outperforms all other methods for big size problems. Keywords: linear programming; LP; transportation problem; basic feasible solution. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Harrath, Y. and Kaabi, J. (2018) ‘New heuristic to generate an initial basic feasible solution for the balanced transportation problem’, Int. J. Industrial and Systems Engineering, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp.193–204. Biographical notes: Youssef Harrath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at College of Information Technology, the University of Bahrain since 2010. He received his BSc degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Science, Monastir-Tunisia in 1998. He obtained his MSc degree in Operational Research, Combinatorial, and Optimisation from the International Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble-France in 2000. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technique, Besançon-France in 2003. He has 12 years of teaching experience as an Assistant Professor at University of Bahrain, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia, High Institute of Applied Computer Sciences of Lorraine: Nancy, France, and National Institute of Applied Science, Rouen, France. He is actively working in many research areas such as: scheduling under availability constraints, optimisation techniques, and genetic algorithms. Jihene Kaabi is an Assistant Professor at the College of Information Technology, University of Bahrain. She received her BSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Science, Monastir-Tunisia in 1999. She obtained her MSc degree in Operational Research, Combinatorial, and Optimisation from the International Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble-France in