Optimization of species transportation via an exclusive fuzzy trapezoidal centroid approach

Various types of species are transported every year from one place to another due to many factors including climatic changes, food availability and variation in temperatures. In these realistic problems the information about available space, requirement of species in any habitat and cost of transportation is not available in deterministic form. For this reason, the data used in present article is taken into interval form and termed these problems as interval data-based transportation problems (IBTPs). For optimization a new fuzzification approach is proposed to convert IBTP into fuzzy transportation problems. Defuzzification of obtained trapezoid fuzzy data is done using a unique ranking technique based on centroid of trapezoid. A comparative study with the available methods has been done and the results are found in good agreement. The method developed in this study is applicable in species transportation as well as in industrial transportation problems where the difference between actual and expected demand and supply is very large.