Approach to an Assignment Problem with Hierarchical Objectives

摘要

At the Naval Military Personnel Command (NMPC), multiple objectives must beconsidered in assigning personnel to billets. For the assignment of Naval officers, these objectives in decreasing order of importance are to satisfy the needs of the Navy, to enhance the careers of officers, to fulfill the desires of officers, and to minimize cost. To assist in this complicated task, a procedure which considers these four objectives in their order of importance is proposed. Each time, a standard assignment problem is solved by optimizing one objective with the additional constraint that values of the other more important objectives remain above specified levels. A modification of multiobjective programming technique, the Noninferior Set Estimation method, is used to guarantee integer solutions to an assignment problem with these additional constraints. An application of the procedure to an actual Navy officer assignment problem indicates its potential as a decision aid to NMPC officers and other decision makers. Keywords: Multiobjective programming, Assignment problem, Noninferior set estimation, Navy officer assignment, Manpower planning. Theses. (JHD)