Exact solution methods for the assignment problem with conflict constraints

The Assignment Problem with Conflict Constraints (APC) deals with finding a maximum weight assignment in the presence of incompatibilities. The incompatibilities are constituted by the conflicting edge pairs such that both edges in a conflicting pair cannot be in a feasible solution. Unlike the assignment problem, APC is a NP-hard problem; therefore, it brings about the importance of finding efficient solution procedures for APC. Yet, there are only a few studies on APC that put forward exact solution procedures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which proposes Branch & Cut algorithms for the solution of APC. Within the computational analysis, we first evaluated the performance of Branch & Bound with different branching rules. Afterwards, we assessed the performance of additional algorithms with the best performing branching rule. Finally, we checked the contribution of the added cuts to the overall problem with the selected branching rule and the default branching rule of the mixed integer linear programming commercial solver. The computational results showed that the Branch & Bound algorithm with the best performing branching rule, the Branch & Cut algorithm with clique cuts and the Branch & Cut algorithm with combination of clique and cycle cuts performed better compared to the state-of-art commercial solver.