Time-Cost Trade-Off Analysis in Some Constrained Assignment Problems

Several variations of two-dimensional (workers x jobs) and three-dimensional (workers x jobs x machines) time- as well as cost-minimizing assignment problems, which arise owing to (i) precedence relations of some form among the jobs or (ii) capacity restrictions on workers/machines imposed by the requirement that the surplus resources have to be fully employed, have been considered in the literature. In this paper, an algorithm is presented for time-cost trade-off analysis which is applicable to any general pair of such constrained problems. The algorithm is also illustrated by a numerical example.