As the production manager at Hot Air Aviation you make hot air balloons. Your forecasted demand for the next four months is 850, 1,260, 510 and 980.

You know that during the last 46 days you had 120 employees and you were able to make 1,700 balloons. In the next four months assume that you will have 26, 24, 20 and 16 working days respectively. Currently you have 100 employees and no staring inventory.

a) What is the minimum constant workforce required to meet the demand over the next four months?

b) If holding cost C_I of a balloon is $100 per month, cost of hiring C_H is $100 and firing C_F is $200 per employee evaluate the cost of your plan.

c) Now you decided to optimize your plan: formulate the problem as a linear programming problem. Show all the values (not symbols) necessary to solve the problem.