How Best to Handle a Dicey Situation

We introduce the Destructive Object Handling (DOH) problem, which models aspects of many real-world allocation problems, such as shipping explosive munitions, scheduling processes in a cluster with fragile nodes, re-using passwords across multiple websites, and quarantining patients during a disease outbreak. In these problems, objects must be assigned to handlers, but each object has a probability of destroying itself and all the other objects allocated to the same handler. The goal is to maximize the expected value of the objects handled successfully. We show that finding the optimal allocation is NP-complete, even if all the handlers are identical. We present an FPTAS when the number of handlers is constant. We note in passing that the same technique also yields a first FPTAS for the weapons-target allocation problem [1] with a constant number of targets. We study the structure of DOH problems and find that they have a sort of phase transition – in some instances it is better to spread risk evenly among the handlers, in others, one handler should be used as a “sacrificial lamb”. We show that the problem is solvable in polynomial time if the destruction probabilities depend only on the handler to which an object is assigned; if all the handlers are identical and the objects all have the same value; or if each handler can be assigned at most one object. Finally, we empirically evaluate several heuristics based on a combination of greedy and genetic algorithms. The proposed heuristics return fairly high quality solutions to very large problem instances (upto 250 objects and 100 handlers) in tens of seconds.