Letter to the Editor—An Application of the Assignment Problem

Abstract

The famous physician who discovered a cure for which there was no known disease has his parallel in many OR discoveries of solutions for which there is no known problem. Outstanding among these is the assignment problem. Mathematically, the assignment model can be represented as a linear-programming model in which each coefficient in every constraint equation is zero or unity. It provides a particularly attractive introduction for students to linear programming because the model is so simple, and because the Hungarian method (Flood, Merrill M. 1956. The traveling-salesman problem. Opns Res. 4 61–72.) provides such elegant solutions.