In this paper, we consider transportation problem to obtain the solution almost optimal or a better initial solution. The most important and successful applications in the optimization refer to transportation problem, that is, a special class of the linear programming in the operation research. The main objective of transportation problem is to minimize the cost or the time of transportation. Most of the currently used methods for solving transportation problems are trying to reach the optimal solution, whereby, most of these methods are considered complex and very expansive. Approximate heuristics give good starting solution to the transportation problem like Vogel’s Approximation Method (VAM). In this study, we develop a heuristic to obtain a good initial solution to the transportation problem, namely, Triple Test Algorithm (TTA)in which the key idea is to obtain the closest to optimal solution or a better initial solution than other available methods. Comparatively, applying the TTA in the proposed method obtains the best initial feasible solution to a transportation problem and performs faster than the existing methods with a minimal computation time and less complexity. We hope that the proposed method would be an attractive alternative to traditional transportation problem solution methods.

operation research, linear programming, transportation problem, optimization problems, heuristics, transportation model, Vogel’s Approximation Method, Triple Test Algorithm.