Abstract
The paper develops a technique to solve two stage time minimization assignment problem dealing with the allocation of n jobs to n persons in two stages where \(n_1\) out of n jobs are primary jobs and constitute Stage-I and rest of the jobs are secondary jobs constituting Stage-II. It is assumed that each person can be assigned to one job only and each job is to be done by exactly one person. Further, in a particular stage, all the jobs are commenced simultaneously. Stage-II jobs are commenced only after Stage-I jobs are finished and the objective is to find an assignment which minimizes the total completion time of Stage-I and Stage-II jobs. Numerical examples are provided to support the theory. The proposed algorithm has been coded in MATLAB and tested on different problems with n varying from 10 to 100.


Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aggarwal V (1983) The assignment problem under categorized jobs. Eur J Oper Res 14:193–195
Aggarwal V, Tikekar VG, Hsu LF (1986) Bottleneck assignment problems under categorization. Comput Oper Res 13(1):11–26
Armstrong RD, Zhiying J (1992) Solving linear bottleneck assignment problems via strong spanning trees. Oper Res Lett 12:179–180
Bansal S, Puri MC (1980) A min–max problem. ZOR 24:191–200
Bhatia HL (1977) Time minimizing assignment problem. SCIMA 6:75–83
Brandt A, Intrator Y (1971) The assignment problem with three job categories. Casopis pro Pestovani Matematiky 96:8–11
Carpaneto G, Toth P (1981) Algorithm for the solution of the bottleneck assignment problem. Computing 27:179–187
Derigs U (1984) Alternate strategies for solving bottleneck assignment problems-analysis and computational results. Computing 33:95–106
Derigs U, Zimmermann U (1978) An augmenting path method for solving linear bottleneck assignment problems. Computing 19:285–295
Edmonds J, Fulkerson DR (1970) Bottleneck extrema. J Comb Theory 8:299–306
Ford DR, Fulkerson DR (1962) Flows in networks. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Fulkerson R, Glicksberg I, Gross O (1953) A production line assignment problem. Technical Report RM-1102, Rand Corporation, Sta. Monica, CA
Garfinkel R (1971) An improved algorithm for the bottleneck assignment problem. Oper Res 19:1747–1751
Gross O (1959) The bottleneck assignment problem. Technical Report P-1630, The Rand Corporation, Sta. Monica, CA
Kaur P, Sharma A, Verma V, Dahiya K (2016) A priority based assignment problem. Appl Math Model 40(7):7784–7795
Kuhn HW (1955) The Hungarian method for the assignment problem. Naval Res Logist Q 2:83–97
Page ES (1963) A note on assignment problems. Comput J 6:241–243
Pferschy U (1997) Solution methods and computational investigations for the linear bottleneck assignment problem. Computing 59(3):237–258
Porsching TA (1963) Matrix assignments and an associated min–max problem. Math Comput 17(81):81–84
Punnen AP, Aneja YP (1993) Categorized assignment scheduling: a tabu search approach. J Oper Res Soc 44(7):673–679
Ravindran A, Ramaswami V (1977) On the bottleneck assignment problem. J Optim Theory Appl 21(4):451–458
Seshan CR (1981) Some generalisations of the time minimising assignment problem. J Oper Res Soc 32(6):489–494
Sonia, Puri MC (2008) Two-stage time minimizing assignment problem. Omega 36:730–740
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Editor-In-Chief for his support during the review process, and also the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments which helped in improving the manuscript considerably. The first author is thankful to Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India (Sanction No. 09/135/(0724)/2015-EMR-I) for providing financial support for carrying out this research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jain, E., Dahiya, K., Sharma, A. et al. An improved algorithm for two stage time minimization assignment problem. J Comb Optim 37, 713–736 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-018-0318-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-018-0318-2