QAM-III, 2010 Section D & E

Course Instructor: Sonia

Problem Sheet1: Formulation Problems

1. Project Assignment Problem

There are n projects to be assigned to m civil servants. Each person must be assigned to exactly one
project. A project must have at least one person assigned to it. Further, at least two persons must be
assigned to project 2 but not more than two persons can be assigned to project 3. Moreover, Persons
4 and 5 should be assigned to the same project. Formulate the problem so as to maximize the total
effectiveness when cij is the effectiveness if ith person is assigned to j th project.

2. Knapsack Problem
Articles of n different types are available. Each article of type i has a weight of wi kg and a value of vi
dollars. A knapsack that can hold a weight of at most w kg has to be loaded with these articles so as
to maximize the total value of the articles included, subject to the knapsacks weight capacity. Articles
cannot be broken; only a nonnegative integer number of articles of each type can be loaded.

3. Bin Packing Problem

There are m bins of fixed size b and n objects of various sizes to be packed into the bins where ith object
is of size ai . Pack all the objects into as few bins as possible.

4. Traveling Salesman Problem

A salesman has to travel to cities 1, 2, . . . n. The cost of traveling from city i to city j is cij dollars, for
i 6= j = 1 to n. He wants to start in some city, visit each of the other cities exactly once in some order,
and in the end return to the starting city. The problem is to determine an optimal order for traveling
the cities so that the total cost is minimized.

5. Procurement Problems
There are m types of equipment available. There is already a stock of ai units of type i, i = 1, to m. In
addition a budget of α dollars is available to buy extra quantities of equipment. One unit of type i costs
pi dollars. Equipment can only be bought and allotted in integer number of units. There are n stations
that use these equipments. The j th station can use a maximum of bj units of all types of equipments
put together. the profit accruing as a result of assigning one equipment unit of type i to the j th station
is cij dollars. The problem is to determine how many pieces of equipment units of each type are to be
purchased and how to distribute this equipment among the stations.

6. Plant location problem

There are n sites in a region that require a product. The demand for the product over the planning
horizon in the area containing site i is di units, i = 1 to n. The demand has to be met by manufacturing
the product within the region. You need to set up m or less plants for manufacturing the product to
satisfy the demand, where m is specified. The set-up cost for building a manufacturing plant at site i
is fi dollars. If a plant is built at site i, ki units is its production capacity over the planning horizon.
The fixed charge for setting up a route for transporting the product from site i to site j is fij dollars.
If a route is set up to transport the product from site i to j, kij units is its capacity over the planning
horizon, and cij dollars is the cost for transporting one unit of the product from i to j. In practice m
will be much smaller than n, and the product will be shipped from the sites where it is manufactured
to all other sites in the region. The problem is to determine an optimal subset of sites for locating the
plants and a shipping schedule over the entire horizon so as to minimize the total cost of building the
plants, setting up the routes and actually transporting the product.