The assignment problem generally assumes that one person undertakes one task and one task must be accomplished by only one person. However, a real task usually calls for more than one person. In some cases, those persons are required to work at the same time, if so, the classical assignment model will be inoperative to describe the problem. To solve this problem, a new generalized assignment model based on nonlinear integer programming is proposed in this paper. The new model is available for

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... ose problems in which a single task may demand more than one person to be engaged in at the same time, as a result, it makes up for the existing generalized assignment models' deficiency. Moreover, a method to convert the quadratic integer programming model to a linear one is also presented. Thus, the generalized assignment problem can be solved within a short time by using the existing mathematical software LINGO. The numerical results indicate that the generalized assignment model and method proposed are valid.