Revised simplex method and its application for solving fuzzy linear programming problems

Linear programming models play an important role in management, economic, data envelopment analysis, operations research and many industrial applications. In many practical situations there is a kind of ambiguity in the parameters of these models which can be expressed by means of fuzzy numbers. In the literature of fuzzy mathematical programming there are many types of the fuzzy linear programming problems. But in this paper, we deal with a kind of linear programming which includes the triangular fuzzy numbers in its parameters. For finding the solution of these problems, we propose a revised simplex algorithm for an extended linear programming problem which is equivalent to the original fuzzy linear programming problem. An illustrative example is presented to clarify the proposed approach. A fuzzy DEA model has been also considered as a practical application to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [Received 20 December 2009; Revised 29 September 2010; Accepted 11 November 2010]