ABSTRACT
The fixed charge transportation problem (FCTP) is one of important and classical transportation problems with many real world applications in the area of logistics and supply chain management. Due to nature complexity of this problem, the literature has seen a large number of heuristics and meta heuristics to solve the FCTP. This paper proposes a new heuristic along with well known meta heuristics to solve the FCTP with discount supposition on both fixed and variable charges. In addition, two models with all units discount and incremental discount are firstly introduced in this study to apply the discount mechanism. As such, since the previous researchers mainly used spanning tree based and priority based representations, this study utilizes both of these methods and compared the results. Finally, a comprehensive discussion based on the computational results of heuristic and meta heuristics with different encoding approaches has been investigated through different problem sizes.