On the initialization methods of an exterior point algorithm for the assignment problem

In this paper, we present a theoretical investigation and an extensive computational study of exterior point simplex algorithm (EPSA) initialization methods for the assignment problem (AP). We describe the exterior point algorithm using three different initialization methods. Effective implementations are explored for each initialization method. Then we perform an experimental evaluation on a large set of benchmark problems from the TSPLib 95 and OR Library collections. The results obtained demonstrate the advantages of the three initialization methods. Finally, we give a theoretical justification of the initialization methods efficiency. We explain theoretically the computational ranking for these methods.