Larry edison is the director of the computer center for buckly college. he now needs to schedule the staffing of the center. it is open from 8 am until midnight. larry has monitored the usage of the center at various times of the day and determined that the following number of computer consultants are required:
col1 time of day 8 am -noon noon – 4 pm 4 pm – 8 pm 8 pm - midnight
col2 minimum number of consultants required to be on duty 4 8 10 6
two types of computer consultants can be hired: full-time and part-time. the full-time consultants work for eight consecutive hours in any of the following shifts: morning (8 am – 4 pm), and evening (4 pm – midnight). full-time consultants are paid $14.00 per hour.
part-time consultants can be hired to work any of the four shifts listed in the table. part-time consultants are paid $12.00 per hour.
an additional requirement is that during every time period, there must be at least two full-time consultants on duty for every part-time consultant on duty.
larry would like to determine how many full-time and part-time consultants should work each shift to meet the above requirements at the minimum possible cost.
a-formulate a linear programming model for this problem on a spreadsheet. use the solver to solve this model.
b-summarize the model in algebraic form by defining the decision variables, the objective function and all the constraints.