Hall allocation model 2026-10-14
In a unit-capacity assignment problem, left vertices represent demands and right vertices represent individually usable resources; an edge records compatibility. All constraints must be encoded by those allowed pairs and by using each resource at most once. Hall's marriage theorem decides feasibility. Costs belong to an additional mathematical optimization problem; precedence between jobs or requirements for consecutive slots need additional modelling.
The authored Notes on the design of a conference scheduler by David R. MacIver (Implementation, 7 August 2022) illustrates a Hall obstruction with four talks confined to three slots. With one talk per slot, that subset has size four and a graph neighbourhood of size three. An unused slot outside its graph neighbourhood does not remove the bottleneck. In the three-job example above, the same scheduling model instead has two complete assignments.
The allocation exercise in Graph Theory by Reinhard Diestel (Matching, Covering and Packing, printed p. 20, Exercise 9) asks for disjoint subsets of prescribed nonnegative integer sizes . Replace demand by left vertices with allowed resource set . Hall's marriage theorem gives exactly the condition
For a numerical instance, let , , and . The separate demands and their combined demand fit, and works. Raising to two leaves both individual tests valid but demands four distinct resources from a set union of size three. This is the same collective obstruction with repeated demand vertices.