What are two ways to control quantity demand?

When applying LP to diet problems, the objective function is usually designed to:

a) maximize profits from blends of nutrients.

b) maximize ingredient blends.

c) minimize production losses.

d) maximize the number of products to be produced.

e) minimize the costs of nutrient blends.

Good airline scheduling is essential to delivering outstanding customer service with high plane utilization rates. Airlines must schedule pilots, flight attendants, aircraft, baggage handlers, customer service agents, and ramp crews. At Alaska Airlines, it all begins with seasonal flight schedules that are developed 330 days in advance. Revenue and marketing goals drive the potential routing decisions, but thousands of constraints impact these schedules. Using SABRE scheduling optimizer software, Alaska considers the number of planes available, seat capacity, ranges, crew availability, union contracts that dictate hours that crews can fly, and maintenance regulations that regularly take planes out of service, just to name a few. Alaska's scheduling department sends preliminary schedules to the human resources, maintenance, operations, customer service, marketing, and other departments for feedback before finalizing flight schedules.

Alaska Airlines' historic mission is to serve its extremely loyal customer base in the remote and unreachable small towns in Alaska. Serving many airports in Alaska is especially complex because the airline requires its pilots to have special skills to deal with extremely adverse weather, tight mountain passes, and short runways. Some airports lack full-time TSA agents or strong ground support and may not even be open 24 hours per day. In some cases, runways are not plowed because the village plow is busy clearing the roads for school buses. Navigational technology developed by Alaska Airlines has significantly reduced weather-related cancelled flights as Alaska can now land where many other carriers cannot. After the SABRE optimizer schedules thousands of flights, scheduling activity turns to the next step: crew optimizing. The crew optimizer (Alaska uses Jeppersen software developed by Boeing and based on linear programming) attempts to eliminate unnecessary layovers and crew idle time while adhering to FAA and union restrictions. Alaska leads the industry in pilot "hard time" (i.e., the amount of time a pilot is being paid when passengers are actually being moved). After the crew requirements for every flight are determined, the $3.000$ flight attendants and $1.500$ pilots rank their preferred routings on a monthly basis. Personnel are assigned to each flight using seniority and feasibility. Interestingly, not every pilot or flight attendant always bids on the Hawaii routes (about $20 \%$ of all flights), the long-haul East Coast routes, or the Mexico flights. Some prefer the flying challenge of the "milk run" flights to Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and back to Seattle, which are in keeping with the culture and contact with local residents.

As an airline that accentuates risk taking and empowers employees to think "out of the box," Alaska recently decided to experiment with a schedule change on its Seattle-to-Chicago route. Given crew restrictions on flying hours per day, the flight had previously included a crew layover in Chicago. When a company analyst documented the feasibility of running the same crew on the two 4-hour legs of the round trip (which implied an extremely tight turnaround schedule in Chicago), his data indicated that on $98.7 \%$ of the round trip flights, the crew would not "time out." His boss gave the go-ahead.

Why is scheduling for Alaska more complex than for other airlines?

A route sheet:

a) lists the operations necessary to produce a component.

b) is an instruction to make a given quantity of a particular item.

c) is a schematic showing how a product is assembled.

d) is a document showing the flow of product components.

e) all of the above.

What are the sources of energy the foodservice industry uses?

Where a constraint crosses the vertical or horizontal axis, the quantity is fairly obvious. How does one go about finding the quantity coordinates where two constraints cross, not at an axis?

Explain how overproduction and underproduction can affect cost

Compute the takt time for a system where the total time per shift is 480 minutes, there is one shift, and workers are given two 15-minute breaks and 45 minutes for lunch. Daily demand is 300 units.

Calls arrive at Lynn Ann Fish's hotel switchboard at a rate of 2 per minute. The average time to handle each is 20 seconds. There is only one switchboard operator at the current time. The Poisson and negative exponential distributions appear to be relevant in this situation.

What is the average time that a customer must wait before reaching the operator?

If Fender Guitar pays $\$ 30$ per day to a worker in its Ensenada, Mexico, plant, and the employee completes four instruments per 8-hour day, the labor cost/unit is

a) $\$ 30.00$.

b) $\$ 3.75$.

c) $\$ 7.50$.

d) $\$ 4.00$.

e) $\$ 8.00$.

Captain Borders Corp. manufacturers fishing equipment. Currently, the company has a plant in Los Angeles and a plant in New Orleans. William Borders, the firm's owner, is deciding where to build a new plant-Philadelphia or Seattle. Use the following table to find the total shipping costs for each potential site. Which should Borders select?

Dr. Tarun Gupta, a Michigan vet, is running a rabies vaccination clinic for dogs at the local grade school. Tarun can "shoot" a dog every 3 minutes. It is estimated that the dogs will arrive independently and randomly throughout the day at a rate of one dog every 6 minutes according to a Poisson distribution. Also assume that Tarun's shooting times are negative exponentially distributed. Compute the following:

The probability that Tarun is idle.

What cycle time would match capacity and demand if demand is 120 units a day, there are two shifts of 480 minutes each, and workers are given three half-hour breaks during each shift, one of which is for lunch or dinner?

The Collector's Choice Inc. (CCI), a luxury car import company, has an old warehouse at the Port of Miami, Florida, where it temporarily stores expensive sports cars and automotive parts that arrive from Europe. This summer, CCI has noticed that the termite infestation in the warehouse has escalated to a point where tenting cannot be postponed anymore. (Tenting is the process of wrapping a building inside a huge tent that is subsequently filled with a poisonous gas capable of killing most forms of life inside, including insects, plants, pets, and human beings.) CCI's pest control company's contract specifies a to-do list of pre-tenting tasks, which include:

• Turning off all air-conditioning units and opening all windows of the warehouse
• Turning off all internal and external lights, including those operating on a timer
• Pruning all outdoor vegetation at least $18 "$ away from the warehouse
• Soaking the soil around the warehouse on the first day of tenting The requirement of opening all windows is particularly worrisome to CCI because it means turning off the alarm system, leaving the warehouse vulnerable to burglary for 48 hours - the required amount of time for the poisonous gas to do its job. Therefore, Alex Ferrari, the warehouse manager, is thinking about hiring a security company to monitor the facility during that period. CCl's property insurance deductible is $\$ 25,000$, and Alex is assuming that if thieves are willing to enter a building full of poisonous gas to steal something, they would certainly take more than $\$ 25,000$ worth of parts or even an entire car!

After making a few phone calls, Alex gets in touch with ProGuard, a trustworthy local security company that charges $\$ 150$ per hour to have a security guard stationed outside their warehouse. The city of Miami police records indicate that about $30 \%$ of businesses that left their facilities unattended during tenting reported stolen property in the past 3 years. Although Alex thinks ProGuard's prices are reasonable, and having a guard outside the warehouse would certainly help, he is still not sure whether it is worth spending the extra money. After all, ProGuard's contract does not guarantee the protection it provides is infallible. In fact, an analysis of the company's records indicates that $3 \%$ of their clients were burglarized over the past 3 years. (Despite this figure, ProGuard is still the best security company in the area.)

Create a decision tree analysis to help decide whether Alex Ferrari should hire ProGuard's services.