BALANCING THE ASSIGNMENT OF CUSTOMER GROUPS AMONG EMPLOYEES - ZERO-ONE GOAL PROGRAMMING AND HEURISTIC APPROACHES

Addresses an actual problem of assigning customers to employees in a m ail order firm. The management of the firm groups customers based on t he first letter of the last name. To make assigning responsibility for handling customer orders easier, management specifies that no letter group can be broken up. In other words, all customers with last names beginning with the same letter must be assigned to the same employee. Management also desires a fair assignment among employees. A perfectly fair assignment entails assigning the same number of customers to eve ry employee. A lower bound on the solution to the problem is establish ed and two approaches to the problem are developed. First, it is formu lated as a zero-one goal programming problem and thus commercially ava ilable computer codes can be used to solve it. Second, a heuristic app roach which assigns customers to employees based on rules similar to a ssembly line balancing is developed. The zero-one goal programming app roach yields slightly better results. However, it requires longer comp uter running time.