To the question of number of solutions of the transport problem with two or three providers

The paper gives estimates of the number of basic solutions to transport problems of 2xn and 3xn dimensions. Special problems giving a large range of number of solutions are considered, regardless of the type of target function and specific values of costs. To get the estimates the methods of combinatorics and graph theory are used as well as north-west corner method with variation of rows and columns. Results of the presented paper relate to the considered problems with arbitrary amount of consumers and can be used in applications of the approximate methods to the modified transport problems and estimations of their efficiency.