Assignment problem

About: Assignment problem is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7588 publications have been published within this topic receiving 172820 citations. The topic is also known as: marriage problem.

Implementation and Testing of a Primal-Dual Algorithm for the Assignment Problem

Abstract: State-of-the-art computational results have shown that primal simplex algorithms are more efficient than primal-dual algorithms for general minimum cost network flow problems. There is, however, some controversy concerning their relative merits for solving assignment problems. This paper presents a detailed development for a computationally efficient primal-dual algorithm and extensive computational comparisons to primal simplex algorithms.

Destination-Aware Task Assignment in Spatial Crowdsourcing: A Worker Decomposition Approach

Abstract: With the proliferation of GPS-enabled smart devices and increased availability of wireless network, spatial crowdsourcing (SC) has been recently proposed as a framework to automatically request workers (i.e., smart device carriers) to perform location-sensitive tasks (e.g., taking scenic photos, reporting events). In this paper, we study a destination-aware task assignment problem that concerns the optimal strategy of assigning each task to proper worker such that the total number of completed tasks can be maximized whilst all workers can reach their destinations before deadlines after performing assigned tasks. Finding the global optimal assignment turns out to be an intractable problem since it does not imply optimal assignment for individual worker. Observing that the task assignment dependency only exists amongst subsets of workers, we utilize tree-decomposition technique to separate workers into independent clusters and develop an efficient depth-first search algorithm with progressive bounds to prune non-promising assignments. In order to make our proposed framework applicable to more scenarios, we further optimize the original framework by proposing strategies to reduce the overall travel cost and allow each task to be assigned to multiple workers. Extensive empirical studies verify that the proposed technique and optimization strategies perform effectively and settle the problem nicely.

A framework for optimizing paper matching

Abstract: At the heart of many scientific conferences is the problem of matching submitted papers to suitable reviewers. Arriving at a good assignment is a major and important challenge for any conference organizer. In this paper we propose a framework to optimize paper-to-reviewer assignments. Our framework uses suitability scores to measure pairwise affinity between papers and reviewers. We show how learning can be used to infer suitability scores from a small set of provided scores, thereby reducing the burden on reviewers and organizers. We frame the assignment problem as an integer program and propose several variations for the paper-to-reviewer matching domain. We also explore how learning and matching interact. Experiments on two conference data sets examine the performance of several learning methods as well as the effectiveness of the matching formulations.

GPU-accelerated Hungarian algorithms for the Linear Assignment Problem

Abstract: Linear Assignment is one of the most fundamental problems in operations research.A creative parallelization of a Hungarian-like algorithm on GPU cluster.Efficient parallelization of the augmenting path search step.Large problems with 1.6 billion variables can be solved.It is probably the fastest LAP solver using a GPU. In this paper, we describe parallel versions of two different variants (classical and alternating tree) of the Hungarian algorithm for solving the Linear Assignment Problem (LAP). We have chosen Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) enabled NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPU) as the parallel programming architecture because of its ability to perform intense computations on arrays and matrices. The main contribution of this paper is an efficient parallelization of the augmenting path search phase of the Hungarian algorithm. Computational experiments on problems with up to 25 million variables reveal that the GPU-accelerated versions are extremely efficient in solving large problems, as compared to their CPU counterparts. Tremendous parallel speedups are achieved for problems with up to 400 million variables, which are solved within 13 seconds on average. We also tested multi-GPU versions of the two variants on up to 16 GPUs, which show decent scaling behavior for problems with up to 1.6 billion variables and dense cost matrix structure.

Assignment and Scheduling in Flexible Job-Shops by Hierarchical Optimization

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical method for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP). This approach is mainly adapted to a job-shop problem (JSP) with high flexibility and is based on the decomposition of the problem in an assignment subproblem and a sequencing subproblem. For the first subproblem, we propose two methods: the first one is based successively on a heuristic approach and a local search; the second one, however, is based on a branch-and-bound algorithm. The quality of the assignment is evaluated by a lower bound. For the second subproblem we apply a hybrid genetic algorithm to deal with the sequencing problem. Computational tests are finally presented.