Davila Pena, LauraBorm, PeterGarcía Jurado, IgnacioSchouten, Jop2025-12-152025-12-152025-06-04Davila‐Pena, L., Borm, P., García‐Jurado, I., & Schouten, J. (2026). An allocation rule for connection scheduling problems. International Transactions in Operational Research, 33(2), 892-925.0969-6016https://hdl.handle.net/10347/44476This paper studies so-called connection scheduling problems, a type of interactive operations research problem. A connection scheduling problem combines aspects from the minimum cost spanning tree and sequencing problems. Given a graph, we aim to first establish a connection order on the players such that the total cost of connecting them to a source is minimal and second to find a fair cost allocation of such an optimal order among the players involved. We restrict our attention to connection scheduling problems on trees and propose a recursive method to solve these tree connection scheduling problems integrated with an allocation approach. This latter mechanism consistently and recursively uses benchmark endogenous myopic orders to determine potential cost savings, which will then be appropriately allocated. Interestingly, the transition process from a benchmark myopic order to an optimal one will be smooth using the switching of blocks of agents based on the basic notion of merge segmentseng© 2025 The Author(s). International Transactions in Operational Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Federation of Operational Research Societies. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution LicenseAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/CooperationSequencing problemsConnection scheduling problemsCost allocation1207 Investigación operativa120706 Teoría de juegosjournal article10.1111/itor.700521475-3995open access