Optimal partition of a large labor force into working pairs (Q847812)

This article studies the problem of pairing workers and managers with different skills in an optimal manner. The authors first present the background to this interesting problem and a short overview of the literature. This is followed by the mathematical formulation of the pairing problem where the space of all skill types is a compact multi-dimensional Hausdorff space and the productivity of each pairing is a known, asymmetric function (to account that in each pair one person may be the manager and the other the assistant). The next two sections concentrate in the mixed pairing extension of the problem, where the existence of an optimal solution is proven and duality aspects are studied. The fifth and sixth section move on to describe the links of the optimal pairing problem with transportation theory. The article concludes with a section on examples of applications of this theory and a discussion of the results. Throughout this detailed article a large number of theorems, lemmas and propositions are presented and proven. The paper concludes with a list of useful references.