Modeling Ancient Indian Trade Networks Using Operations Research: A Graph Theory Approach

Abstract: Early Indian trade routes It was critical to the economic and cultural development of the subcontinent. These intricate networks unified the cities, ports, and trade centers of the Indus valley to the Southeast Asia and have enabled the exchange of goods including spices, textile, metals, and medicinal plants. Modern Operations Research (OR) tools have been also employed in this study: The graph theory and shortest path problem will be used in order to analyze and model those historical trade routes. Historical sources, archaeological data, geographical reconstructions have been used to model ancient trade networks as weighted graphs (the nodes are trade centers, and the edges are routes with related distance, and risks e.g., terrain difficulty, political instability, banditry, and weather hazards). Applying such algorithms as Dijkstra’s, Bellman-Ford, and Floyd-Warshall the study is able to find the optimal paths, which might have been favoured by ancient traders, on various constraints, namely, travel time, cost, and risk. The multi-objective optimization model is also presented in the paper to consider efficiency and safety in order to capture the real-life decisions taken by traders in dynamic historical situations. The results point to the existence of proto-optimization behavior in ancient Indian trade and they offer a new interdisciplinary solution on how to relate historical geography and mathematical modeling. This study does not only unearth the strategic genius of the ancient Indian traders but also proves the evergreen applicability of OR in resolving practical issues.

weighted graphs, Dijkstra’s algorithm, Floyd-Warshall, Bellman-Ford, optimization model, Indian trade

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