Computational Results for Four Exact Methods to Solve the Three-Objective Assignment Problem

Most of the published exact methods for solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems implicitely use properties of the bi-objective case and cannot easily be generalized to more than two objectives. Papers that deal explicitely with three (or more) objectives are relatively rare and often recent. Very few experimental results are known for these methods and no comparison has been done. We have recently developed a generalization of the two phase method that we have applied to the three-objective assignment problem. In order to evaluate the performance of our method we have implemented three exact methods found in the literature. We provide an analysis of the performance of each method and explain the main difficulties observed in their application to the three-objective assignment problem.