Computational Experiences of Assignment Problems in Agricultural Sector

Agricultural economics which strives for scientific planning in agriculture has become a significant area of specialization in Agriculture. Allocation of available resources to necessary activities in order to minimize the cost/time/wastage or to maximize the profit/effectiveness/quality has identified as one of the key area of decision making in agricultural sector; however, farm planners can offer effective techniques like Assignment Problem to address such a problem and produce optimal solutions. In the first phase of process, a real-time problem has to be converted into an Assignment Problem and in the second phase, the Assignment Problem will be solved for its optimum solution using Hungarian’smethod, widely used procedure to solve the Assignment Problem very effectively. But manual computations of these methods are quite lengthy and consume more time when the number of allocations exceeds three. However, quick and easy solutions became mandate for any cost reduction methodologies as the decision makers are not willing to pay more time at the initial stage of planning perse. Hence, there is a great need to provide not only a scientific and optimum solution but also quick and easy solutions that farm planners are attracted towards scientific decisions by which they can curtail unnecessary expenditure. In this paper, a simple step-wise procedure is developed using Solver tool in MS-Excel to solve an Assignment Problem by means of Linear Programming Technique. It is very flexible for the changes (if any) in the initial cost matrix and updates the optimum solution automatically with a single click instead of redesigning the entire procedure.