We have so far seen many applications of linear programming in our course discussions.(This is the book we work from " Spreadsheet Modeling & Decision Analysis: A Practical Introduction to Business Analytics,8th ed, South-Western CENGAGE Learning, 2017.") This assignment aims to give you an opportunity to use your learnings so far in a practical context. You are expected to identify and solve a practical linear programming problem. This might be related to your work, personal life, or something that you are passionate about. There clearly are no boundaries to where you can make use of these tools so there are no rules about the choice of your problem. If you have issues accessing/collecting/using real data, you can use randomised real data, or generate your own problem instances to solve. We will assess you on the choice of problem to make sure that you put good effort into identifying an interesting problem rather than using a textbook example.
As a part of this assignment you are expected to
i) Describe your problem in detail, and explain your motivation in choosing this particular problem
ii) Model the problem using linear programming formulation; define your decision variables, and explain your objective function and constraints,
iii) Solve the problem using Analytic Solver Platform or Open Solver in Excel, generate answer and sensitivity reports,
iv) Discuss the reports in terms of their meanings, i.e., used resources, binding constraints, allowable increase/decrease, shadow prices etc.