A Least Cost Assignment Technique for Solving Assignment Problems

Abstract

Assignment problem is a special kind of transportation
problem in which each source should have the capacity to fulfill the
demand of any of the destination. In other words, any operator should be
able to perform any job regardless of his skills. Classical Assignment
Problem (AP) is a well-known topic discussed in real physical world. We
consider many classical problems from location theory which may serve
as theoretical models for several logistic problems such that some linear
or quadratic function attains its minimum. It turns out that linear objective
function yields a linear assignment problem, which can be solved easily
by several primal-dual methods like Hungarian method, Shortest
augmenting path method etc. In this paper, a new approach is applied to
solve all types of assignment problems with minimized or maximized
objective functions, namely least cost assignment technique. This method
proposes momentous advantages over similar methods. Proposed method
is a systematic procedure and easy to apply.