PHPSimplex

Optimizing resources with Linear Programming


Minimal road's problem

The problems known like minimal road's problem or shorter road problem, treat as its name shows to find the minimal or shorter route among two points. This minimum can be the distance among origin and destination points or else the elapsed time to go the route between that two points. It's usually used in communications networks problems.

This kind of problems can be solved by the Simplex Method, however exist another more efficient methods for example Dijkstra algorithm or other case can be Bellman-Ford algorithm.

Example

A person must go every day from village A to village G. He is studying with a roads map wich way is the shortest. The roads and its distances are shows in the following figure:

Minimal road's problem

 

Determining decision variables and expressing them algebraically. In this case:

Determining the restrictions and expressing them as equations or inequalities in function of the decision variables. Such restrictions can be obteined from the balance among the possible ways that takes from each village and that wich arrive it (obviating the roads that take back to the starting point and the ones that come from the destination point):

Expressing all implicit conditions established by the origin of variables: negativeness, integer, only a few allowed values... . In this case, the restrictions are that the variables must be boolean (0 the way isn't taken, 1 yes), and so, can't be negatives:

Determining objective function:

Perform a change of variable with the following correspondence:

XAB XAC XBE XBD XDB XEB XCD XCF XFC XDC XDE XED XEG XFG
X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 X6 X7 X8 X9 X10 X11 X12 X13 X14

Solve with PHPSimplex.

Copyright ©2006-2024 PHPSimplex. All rights reserved.Update cookies' preferences
Follow us on Twitter
X

PHPSimplex
Version 0.81

Copyright ©2006-2024. All rights reserved.

Developed by:
Daniel Izquierdo Granja
Juan José Ruiz Ruiz

English translation by:
Luciano Miguel Tobaria

French translation by:
Ester Rute Ruiz

Portuguese translation by:
Rosane Bujes