The Most Economical Redundant Assignment

Redundant assignments are a common way to manage team performance. This requirement arises from real-world practices including team management, and highly-available systems. However, it is a complex problem due to limited resources. The lack of available modeling tools makes it even more difficult to provide an accurate solution. Role-Based Collaboration (RBC) and its Environments-Classes, Agents, Roles, Groups, and Objects (E-CARGO) model are tools well suited to tackle such a problem. This paper formalizes the problem of determining the most economical redundant assignment (MERA) with the E-CARGO model, clarifies it as a multi-objective optimization problem; proposes two solutions: one by using a Linear Programming (LP) solver, i.e., the IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Platform (CPLEX); and one by using our previous work on Group Role Assignment (GRA), where the latter solution is much more efficient than the former one. This work contributes an investigation of the MERA problem to state of the art on the subject of assignment. The proposed solution provides technical support for decision making in solving similar problems.