Quantitative Analysis for Management, 13/e

9.2 The Assignment Problem

The assignment problem refers to the class of LP problem that involves determining the most efficient assignment of people to projects, salespeople to territories, auditors to companies for audits, contracts to bidders, jobs to machines, heavy equipment (such as cranes) to construction jobs, and so on. The objective is most often to minimize total cost or total time of performing the tasks at hand. One important characteristic of assignment problems is that only one job or worker is assigned to one machine or project.

Figure 9.2 provides a network representation of an assignment problem. Notice that this network is very similar to the network for the transportation problem. In fact, an assignment problem may be viewed ...