Abstract
Traditional selection and assignment problems analyze how to select and assign the suppliers to meet demands within minimum total costs. The maximum capacity and the fixed selection costs are two major restrictions imposed on suppliers, and extensively studied in literature.
In practice, another constraint, named as Minimum Quantity Commitment (MQC), needs to be satisfied by each selected supplier. It is stipulated for the global transportation by the US Federal Maritime Commission. According to the MQC, when assigning containers for shipments to US, the international companies, including the Royal Philips Electronics Company, must insure each selected shipping agent to have a certain minimum quantity of containers. This increases difficulties for them to seek the optimal schedule with minimum total costs. The MQC constraint has been seldom studied before, which motivates us to present its hardness results for the selection and assignment problems.
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Lim, A., Wang, F., Xu, Z. (2004). On the Selection and Assignment with Minimum Quantity Commitments. In: Chwa, KY., Munro, J.I.J. (eds) Computing and Combinatorics. COCOON 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3106. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27798-9_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27798-9_13
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