Assignment Problems

Assignment Problems is a useful tool for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students. It provides a comprehensive treatment of assignment problems from their conceptual beginnings in the 1920s through present-day theoretical, algorithmic, and practical developments. The authors have organised the book into 10 self-contained chapters to make it easy for readers to use the specific chapters without having to read the book linearly. The topics covered include bipartite matching algorithms, linear assignment problems, quadratic assignment problems, multi-index assignment problems, and many variations of these problems. Researchers will benefit from the detailed exposition of theory and algorithms related to assignment problems, including the basic linear sum assignment problem and its variations. Practitioners will learn about practical applications of the methods, the performance of exact and heuristic algorithms, and software options. This book also can serve as a text for advanced courses in discrete mathematics, integer programming, combinatorial optimization, and algorithmic computer science.

Rainer Burkard is a Professor of Mathematics at Graz University of Technology, Austria. He has published several books and over 150 papers on discrete optimization and related areas, and he serves as an editor for numerous journals in discrete applied mathematics. His main research focus is combinatorial optimization and its applications.

Mauro Dell'Amico is a Professor of Operations Research at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. His research interests are combinatorial optimization as applied to transportation, telecommunications, routing, and scheduling.

Silvano Martello is a Professor of Operations Research at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is author of Knapsack Problems: Algorithms and Computer Implementations (Wiley, 1990) and Editor-in-Chief of 4OR: A Quarterly Journal of Operations Research. His research focus is the design of algorithms for combinatorial optimization and graph theory problems and their application in packing, routing, and scheduling.