Challenge Sep-2018

Balanced Assignment                                                                                         Solutions

This challenge deals with assignment of people to certain activities, for instance: assigning students to project groups or assigning professors to offices.  Here is the problem formulation as suggested by Prof. Robert Fourer – see his very interesting tutorial “Model-based vs Method-based Optimization”:

Let’s assume we have 210 people that belong to 4 categories as described in the file BalancedAssignment.xls:

You need to assign these 210 people to 12 groups of 16, 17, 18, or 19 people in every group. Of course, a person may be assigned to only one group. “Diversity” means that it is preferable to assign people with the same categories to different groups.

We wonder if along with special optimization tools such as AMPL people can utilize traditional business decision modeling tools to define and solve this quite complex problem. Send your solutions to DecisionManagementCommunity@gmail.com.

Solutions:

• AMPL – provided by Robert Fourer
• OPL – submitted by Alex Fleischer
• CP Optimizer – submitted by Philippe Laborie
• OpenRules with CP/LP Solvers – submitted by Jacob Feldman
• …