Reconsider Prob. 8.1-3.

Suppose that the sales forecasts have been revised downward to 240, 400, and 320 units per day of products 1, 2, and 3, respectively, and that each plant now has the capacity to produce all that is required of any one product. Therefore, management has decided that each new product should be assigned to only one plant and that no plant should be assigned more than one product (so that three plants are each to be assigned one product, and two plants are to be assigned none). The objective is to make these assignments so as to minimize the total cost of producing these amounts of the three products.

(a) Formulate this problem as an assignment problem by constructing the appropriate cost table.

C

(b) Obtain an optimal solution.

(c) Reformulate this assignment problem as an equivalent transportation problem by constructing the appropriate parameter table.

D,I

(d) Starting with Vogel’s approximation method, interactively apply the transportation simplex method to solve the problem as formulated in part (c).