Abstract and Applied Analysis
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 487870, 15 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/487870
Research Article

On the Simplex Algorithm Initializing

Nebojša V. Stojković,1 Predrag S. Stanimirović,2 Marko D. Petković,2 and Danka S. Milojković3

1Faculty of Economics, University of Niš, Trg Kralja Aleksandra 11, 18000 Niš, Serbia
2Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences, University of Niš, Višegradska 33, 18000 Niš, Serbia
3LEDIB Programme Component Coordinator, Nisava District, 18000 Niš, Serbia

Received 15 June 2012; Revised 19 July 2012; Accepted 27 July 2012

Academic Editor: Sung G. Kim

Copyright © 2012 Nebojša V. Stojković et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper discusses the importance of starting point in the simplex algorithm. Three different methods for finding a basic feasible solution are compared throughout performed numerical test examples. We show that our two methods on the Netlib test problems have better performances than the classical algorithm for finding initial solution. The comparison of the introduced optimization softwares is based on the number of iterative steps and on the required CPU time. It is pointed out that on average it takes more iterations to determine the starting point than the number of iterations required by the simplex algorithm to find the optimal solution.