Optimal assignment of high multiplicity flight plans to dispatchers

This paper addresses the problem of finding a feasible schedule of n jobs on m parallel machines, where each job has a deadline and some jobs are preassigned to some machine. This problem arises in the daily assignment of workload to a set of flight dispatchers, and it is strongly characterized by the fact that the job lengths may assume one out of k different values, for small k. We prove the problem to be NP-complete for k = 2 and propose an effective implicit enumeration algorithm which allows efficiently solution a set of real-life instances. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 359–376, 2000