Operations research
Guess first
Guess: why is the assignment problem special?
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Lesson notes
Key points
- The assignment problem is a transportation problem where every supply and every demand equals exactly one.
- So an n by n assignment has only n nonzero allocations, making it highly degenerate for transportation methods.
Definitions
- Assignment problem
- A balanced transportation problem with each supply and demand equal to 1; solved efficiently by the Hungarian method.
Takeaway: Assignment is a degenerate transportation problem; use Hungarian.
Quick check: An assignment problem is best described as which special case?
- A nonlinear program
- An unbalanced LP
- A transportation problem
Assignment = transportation with all supplies and demands equal to 1.
Special caseDegeneracy
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