Assigning suppliers to meet a deadline

In our setting, we consider projects that consist of completing tasks, where each task needs to be executed by a single supplier chosen from a subset of suppliers. The suppliers differ in their execution times, which are stochastically taken from known distributions. The Supplier Assignment for Meeting a Deadline (SAMD) problem is the problem of assigning a supplier to each task in a manner that maximizes the chance to meet some overall project deadline. We propose an A^∗-based approach, along with an efficient admissible heuristic function that guarantees an optimal solution for this problem.