A new algorithm for the quasi-assignment problem

The quasi-assignment problem can be used to solve the bus scheduling problem, the tourist guide problem, and the minimum number of chains in a partially ordered set. A successive shortest path algorithm for the assignment problem is extended to the quasiassignment problem. The algorithm is a variation of the primal-dual algorithm, and its computational complexity isO(n ³).The research for this paper was partly supported by the Chinese National Science Foundation.