ABSTRACT
The transportation problem is a very applicable and relevant logistic problem. In this paper, to test meta-heuristics on the transportation problem and also improve initial feasible solutions in few number of iterations, four recent and effective meta-heuristic algorithms are used to solve transportation problems. Laying Chicken Algorithm (LCA), Volcano Eruption Algorithm (VEA), COVID-19 Optimizer Algorithm (CVA), and Multiverse Algorithm (MVA) are implemented to solve different sizes of the transportation problem. Computational results show that CVA is the most efficient optimizer for large size cases and LCA is the best algorithm for the others. Finally, convergence of algorithms will be discussed and rate of convergence will be compared. The advantage of these heuristics are that they can be easily adapted to more challenging versions of the transportation problem which are not solveable by the Simplex method. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.