Hi,
I just updated to 10.6 and found the optimization tool. This would be a great tool to solve some scheduling problems but I am not quite sure about the input format required....Maybe because I am not a R user?
I have created a sample with excel to solve a scheduling question as reference.
The question (from online http://services.byu.edu/t/quant/opt.html):
Imagine that a restaurant has the following forecast for demand (customer groups) for each hour of the day:
Hour | 11 | 12 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
Groups | 4 | 24 | 16 | 4 | 4 | 12 | 24 | 40 | 32 | 20 |
This data might be represented by an array variable D, where Dt is the forecasted demand for period t in number of groups of customers. (For clarity, we will use t=1 for the 11:00 a.m. hour, t=2 for the noon hour, etc.)
If each server can handle 4 customer groups per hour, how many employees will we need during each hour. This question is complicated by the fact that our employees either work part-time 4 hours per day or full-time 8 hours per day. (For simplicity we will not presently consider break times, which is an interesting problem in itself.) Imagine that full-time employees are paid $6 per hour, and part time employees are paid $8 per hour, according to union rules.
Let us define a decision variable set Ft which tells how many full-time employees will start at period t. Also, let us have a decision variable set Pt that will tell the number of part-time employees starting at period t.
Our objective function will be to minimize the total cost of labor (to have enough for demand). This is as follows (since full-time employees work 8 hours at $6 per hour and part-time employees work 4 hours at $8)
minimize:
subject to
Ft ≥ 0 , Pt ≥ 0 
t ={1..10}
Thanks.
Kenneth
