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Assignment

The document discusses the assignment problem, which aims to assign different jobs to machines to minimize total cost, with each job only able to be assigned to one machine in a one-to-one assignment, and provides examples of assignment problems in allocating workers to jobs or contracts to bidders.

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Naresh Yallamudi
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
19 views

Assignment

The document discusses the assignment problem, which aims to assign different jobs to machines to minimize total cost, with each job only able to be assigned to one machine in a one-to-one assignment, and provides examples of assignment problems in allocating workers to jobs or contracts to bidders.

Uploaded by

Naresh Yallamudi
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ASSIGNMENT
What is an Assignment Problem?

 The assignment problem can be stated as a problem where different


jobs are to beassigned to different machines on the basis of the
cost of doing these jobs. Theobjective is to minimize the total cost
of doing all the jobs on different machines

 The peculiarity of the assignment problem is only one job can be


assigned to onemachine i.e., it should be a one-to-one assignment

 The cost data is given as a matrix where rows correspond to


jobs and columns tomachines and there are as many rows as the
number of columns i.e. the number of jobs and number of Machines
should be equal

 This  can  be compared  to  demand  equals  supply  condition


in  a balancedtransportation  problem.  In  the  optimal  solution
there  should  be  only  onea s s i g nm e n t i n ea c h r o w an d
c o l u m n s o f t h e g i v e n a s s i g nm e n t t a b l e . o n e c a n observe
various situations where assignment problem can exist
e.g.,
assignmentof workers to jobs like assigning clerks to different counters in a
bank or salesmanto different areas for sales, different contracts to bidders.
 Assignment becomes a problem because each job requires different
skills and thecapacity or efficiency of each person with respect to
these jobs can be different.This gives rise to cost differences. If
each person is able to do all jobs equallyefficiently then all costs
will be the same and each job can be assigned to anyperson.         

 When assignment is a problem it becomes a typical


optimization problem it cantherefore be compared to a
transportation problem. The cost elements are givenand is a
square matrix and requirement at each destination is one and
availabilityat each origin is also one.

 In addition we have number of origins which equals the


number of destinationshence the total demand equals total
supply . There is only one assignment in eachrow and each
column .However If we compare this to a transportation problem
wefind that a general transportation problem does not have
the above mentionedlimitations. These limitations are peculiar to
assignment problem only

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