Introduction
Transportation of goods and services is the primary concern of every manufacturer, which makes it an integral part of the production process. Transport and logistics are the main elements in the supply chain, providing the right quantity of goods to the right customer at the right time, in the right place, and in the right condition. The growing ability to deliver goods and distribute them from anywhere globally is expanding the scope of transportation. A transportation problem is a particular type of linear programming problem that aims to minimize the cost of distributing a product from multiple sources or sources in various directions. There is a need to research what transshipment problems present and differentiate them from the transportation ones.
Main body
Transshipment presumes unloading goods or containers from one vessel into another before being shipped off to the terminal point. Today, transshipment plays a vital role in the global supply chain, allowing cargo to be delivered to different parts of the world. This type of shipping is used to avoid the costly transportation of products (Crainic, Giustic, Manerba, & Tadeic, 2021). Nevertheless, such an indirect voyage faces several problems related to time, cost, and other factors.
The transshipment problem can be defined as a Linear Programming Problem (LPP), which presupposes that both source and terminal point are capable of simultaneous loading and unloading of goods; in other words, they can function in both ways. The problem was first proposed by Orden in 1956, “in which he formulated an extension of the original transportation problem to include the possibility of transshipment” (Okiemute, 2017, p. 19). The transshipment problem can be defined as a problem with an increased number of departures and destinations (Ahmed, Khan, Uddin, & Ahmed, 2016; Zhao, Wu, Liang, & Dolgui, 2016). Since the emergence of the transshipment, related problems have appeared.
The first problem concerns simultaneous flows of primary products to the market. In situations where a certain level of inventory is reserved at the source for certain reasons, such as emergencies that limit the overall supply flow, it is delayed in the market. Or else, it is possible that the product is delivered in an increased quantity. The other problem relates to minimizing the shipment time in order to reduce the transportation period. Several well-defined algorithms have been introduced to achieve optimal time for reloading goods from different sources to different destinations (Peres, Repolho, Martinelli, & Monteiro, 2017). Another problem is related to the multi-objectiveness of transportation, which means that for a given period, each delivery source has a throughput, and each terminal point has requested a set delivery cost from the origin to the destination (Wichapa & Khokhajaikiat, 2019). In general, the transshipment problem is defined by multiple sources and destinations, which do not allow solving these problems even using polynomial-time algorithms.
Transshipment problems constitute a significant part of the transportation ones; hence, they differ in some way. A transport problem is a special type of linear programming problem whose goal is to minimize the cost of transporting a given product from a number of sources. When it comes to solving the transport problem, the amounts to be shipped or delivered, the cost of shipping from any origin to any terminal point, and transshipment are not considered. Thus, each item acts only as a shipper or only as a recipient (Kumar, Chopra, & Saxena, 2020). Meanwhile, the transshipment point can act as a supply and demand point from which the goods are supplied.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is necessary to state that the formulation of the transshipment problem is still widely utilized by logisticians, economists, and other researchers to solve spatial issues and distributional tasks. The problem of transshipment is unique in that it offers a wide range of alternative solutions to adapt to changing trends in cargo handling in accordance with modern and international practices. In spite of the difference between transportation and transshipment problems, both of them are also quite broadly used for planning the distribution of cargo, especially in big countries, where distances are long, and transportation is time-consuming.
References
Ahmed, M., Khan, A., Uddin, M., & Ahmed, F. (2016). A new approach to solve transportation problems. Open Journal of Optimization, 5, 22-30. Web.
Kumar, A., Chopra, R. & Saxena, R.R. (2020). An efficient algorithm to solve transshipment problem in uncertain environment. International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, 22, 2613–2624. Web.
Crainic, T., Giustic, R., Manerba, D., & Tadeic, R. (2021). The synchronized location-transshipment problem. Transportation Research Procedia, 52, 43-50. Web.
Okiemute, M. (2017). Transshipment problem and its variants: A review. Mathematical Theory and Modeling, 7(2), 19-32.
Peres, T., Repolho, H., Martinelli, R., & Monteiro, N. (2017). Optimization in inventory-routing problem with planned transshipment: A case study in the retail industry. International Journal of Production Economics, 193, 748-756. Web.
Zhao, F., Wu, D., Liang, L., & Dolgui, A. (2016). Lateral inventory transshipment problem in online-to-offline supply chain. International Journal of Production Research, 54(7), 1951-1963. Web.
Wichapa, N., & Khokhajaikiat, P. (2019). A novel holistic approach for solving the multi-criteria transshipment problem for infectious waste management. Decision Science Letters , 8(4), 441-454.