On the Selection and Assignment Problem with Minimum Quantity Commitments

The thesis studies a new constraint, named minimum quantity commitments, for the selection and assignment problem. It is motivated by the Royal Philips Electronics and a special stipulation of the US Federal Maritime Commission. Our work is expected to initiate the research on this novel constraint for the selection and assignment problem. We first classify all the special cases and prove their computational complexity, and then, focus on a basic problem by analyzing its mixed integer programming model and proposing two heuristics algorithms to solve it. On top of the theoretical analysis, we also implement the different methods, and provide extensive experimentations to measure their performance.