AN EFFECTIVE APPROACH FOR SOLVING THE BINARY ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM WITH SIDE CONSTRAINTS

Abstract

The binary assignment problem with a side constraint requiring the objective function to receive a specified value, which in general is an NP-hard problem, has been the focus of several papers in recent years. The current literature addresses various theoretical aspects of the problem, with a particular emphasis on a simplifying special case, but stops short of giving any computational experience. In this paper, we present a simple reformulation that enables the problem, and some of its extensions, to be solved by commonly available heuristic methods. We present preliminary computational experience with a Tabu search method that illustrates the effectiveness and computational robustness of the approach.