On Complexity and Exact Solution of Production Groups Formation Problem

The success of a modern enterprize is substantially determined by the effectiveness of staff selection and formation of various kinds of functional groups. Creation of such groups requires consideration of different factors depending on the activity of the groups. The problem of production groups formation, considered in this paper, asks for an assignment of workers to jobs taking into account the implicational constraints. The first result of the paper states the NP-hardness of the problem under consideration. The second result is a branch and bound method, which uses supplementary assignment problems for computing bounds. A software implementation of the algorithm is made, and a computational experiment is carried out, comparing the proposed algorithm with the CPLEX solver on randomly generated input data.