Assignment Problem (Hungarian) Calculator

About this calculator

The assignment problem asks: given a set of agents and a set of tasks, each with a different cost depending on who does what, how do you match every agent to exactly one task so the total cost is as small as possible? For a 3×3 cost matrix, this calculator finds the optimal answer by evaluating all 6 possible permutations of assignments — the same optimal result the more scalable Hungarian algorithm (developed by Harold Kuhn in 1955, building on work by Hungarian mathematicians König and Egerváry) would produce for larger matrices in polynomial time.

This is a foundational problem in operations research and combinatorial optimization, with direct applications in assigning workers to jobs, machines to production orders, delivery drivers to routes, or students to project teams so as to minimize total cost or maximize total efficiency. Logistics planners, HR schedulers, and computer scientists studying bipartite matching all encounter this exact problem.