You would like to organize 2 sections of supplier compliance training for a new enterprise social responsibility program. The six supplier representatives have provided their availability over the 8-time slots in the attached spreadsheet. Each supplier representative only needs to attend one of the three scheduled sessions and you would like to schedule the meetings such that the largest number of supplier representatives can attend.

1) Formulate this problem as an integer program model and solve for the optimal solution in Excel. 

2) The statement below is true.

A The best way is to schedule the meetings during slots 1 and 8

B At best, you can have 5 suppliers attending one of the two sections

C The optimal meeting schedule would allow all supplier representatives to attend one of the two sections

D Under the optimal schedule, Supplier A cannot be scheduled because of its limited availability

E None of the above is true.

 

 

Meeting Schedule Availability Supplier A Supplier B Supplier C Supplier D Supplier E Supplier F Total meeting Time slot 1 Time slot 2 1 1 1 1 Time slot 3 Time slot 4 1 1 1 Time slot 5 1 1 Time slot 6 1 1 Time slot 7 1 Time slot 8 1