Cost oriented competing processes — a new handling of assignment problems

The method of Cost Oriented Competing Processes (COCP) is a new approach to handle assignment problems and combinatorial optimization problems. The COCP method works with a system of nonlinear coupled ordinary differential equations with suitable stable points. In contrast to many other techniques, this method can easily be generalized and adapted to different assignment problems, even to those of higher order and with additional constraints. In assignment problems of higher order, the single costs which have to be considered for the total costs depend on several decisions instead of only one decision as in linear assignment problems. The handling of those higher order assignment problems is important for several scheduling problems such as manufacturing planning and time table planning.