THE ASSIGNMENT OF MEN TO MACHINES: AN APPLICATION OF BRANCH AND BOUND
- 1 January 1977
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in Decision Sciences
- Vol. 8 (1) , 56-72
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5915.1977.tb01067.x
Abstract
This paper presents a branch and bound algorithm for assigning men to machines in a production system. The labor assignment problem of concern in this paper occurs when 1) a single operator can service several semi‐automatic machines simultaneously, 2) the service and machine processing times are different among the machines and are deterministic, 3) a strict cyclic service discipline is assumed, and 4) the combined costs of idle labor and machine time are to be minimized. The paper includes a formal definition of the labor assignment problem, a description of the branch and bound algorithm, and a discussion of the computational experience with the algorithm.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
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