Dynamic Optimization of the Transportation of Soybean Seeds in Iran

  Transportation plays an important role in excessive costs and the final price of goods. For this reason, constructing an economic transportation model enables us to optimize various activities in transportation systems for agricultural products, bringing lower costs for consumers of products as a result. The main objective of this study is to construct a dynamic linear programming transportation model in order to minimize the transportation costs of soybean shipped from different supply regions to different pressing oil factories. There are 29 production centers known as supply regions, 2 importing harbors and 7 factories and demanding centers for soybean seeds in Iran. This study used the monthly data of the year 2004 based on the capacities of origin supplies, warehouse (and related monthly stock available in previous period and the amount of transferred shipment to next period), monthly consumption of demanding centers and related transportation costs. LINGO computer package was used to solve the transportation model. Based on the comparison of optimal solutions of the model and the actual transformation costs in 2004, the transformation cost reductions for soybean seeds is 87.67 million Rials.     JEL Classification: Q18