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SOLVED

Binning Based on Multiple Criteria

o-yasinakpinar
6 - Meteoroid

Hi Everyone.

 

I've been struggling with this problem recently and I thought you could help me out. 

 

I have 2 lists (employee list and job list)  and I want to allocate each job in the job list to one of the employees. There are two conditions I would like to achieve simultaneously when allocating the jobs. 

 

Employee List

 

Employee Name
Employee 1
Employee 2
Employee 3
Employee 4

 

Job List

Job CodeJob Price
J1100 $
J228 $
J334 $
J463 $
J588 $
J613 $
J7184 $
J819 $
J953 $
J1066 $
J11111 $
J1296 $
J1381 $

 

Condition 1: I want each employee to have allocated similar number of jobs. I want to minimize the variance between number of jobs allocated to each employee.

 

Condition 2: I want each employee to have allocated similar amount of Price, I want to minimize the variance between Price allocated to each employee.

 

I can tile it by sum amount or equal records with Tile Tool, but I want both of these conditions to be met simultaneously. Should I try using Optimization Tool?

 

Thank you for your advices in advance. 

 

 

3 REPLIES 3
Qiu
21 - Polaris
21 - Polaris

@o-yasinakpinar 
I seems to be a Bin packing problem, but you also limited the number of bin, wihch is a bit tricky.
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/HELP-How-to-use-ITERATIVE-MACRO/m-p/92...
I have given a try but honestly probaly not perfect.

0214-o-yasinakpinar.PNG

o-yasinakpinar
6 - Meteoroid

Thank you for your solution. I appreciate it. Imagine Job List to contain tens of thousands of jobs and employee list hundreds of employees. Although it can be a shortcut solution, what I want is to find the most optimal solution not just any solution which satisfies the constraints. I believe it can be achieved by multi-objective optimization or goal programming algorithms. 

Qiu
21 - Polaris
21 - Polaris

@o-yasinakpinar 
I thiink you are right.

Optimization is mostlike to be an iterative process and requires large dataset for calbrication.

Thank you for the feedback.

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