The transportation problem requires, given a set of suppliers and a set of customers, finding a minimum cost plan to determine how many goods each supplier should send to each customer. Each customer's minimum requirements must be satisfied without exceeding the supply of any supplier. This problem has a plethora of industrial and military applications including applications beyond modeling the physical transporting of goods. In this article, we present the transportation problem; discuss its early history, properties, and relationship to other problems; describe the well‐known transportation simplex method; and survey the literature on transportation algorithms.