S CHOOL OF M ATHEMATICAL S CIENCES , U NIVERSITI S AINS M ALAYSIA

MGM 551 Group Assignment 1

1 RULES
This assignment counts for 20% of your grade. Permissible group sizes are 3 & 4 students. You must submit a report and LINGO code les to amirahr.usm+mgm551@gmail.com by *5pm on Friday the 18th of April 2014. Your report must be in the form of presentation slides in pdf format. A sample report from a past running of this course will be uploaded to Elearning USM for your perusal. The purpose of this sample is to give you an idea of the level of work expected of you. The ow and division of sections in your report need not exactly mirror the sample given. Reports that bear a striking similarity to the sample given will yield less marks than original work. Discussions between groups are encouraged, but copying is not OK. If multiple groups submit reports that are too similar to one another, all groups involved will be heavily penalised. Lateness policy: Suppose that after taking into account all rules, your total mark for the assignment is N and you submit your assignment at time/date t . Your actual mark is dependent on the timeliness of your submission as depicted in the following table:

Submission Timeliness t deadline deadline < t deadline + 24hrs deadline + 24hrs < t deadline + 48hrs t > deadline + 48hrs

Mark N 0.75N 0.5N 0

2 T HE A SSIGNMENT
Choose a specic company/organisation. Acceptable examples: library, hospital, local/family company. Describe a problem faced by your chosen company/organisation and how you intend to better their practices. Note that you are not allowed to simply lift your problem from a book or the internet. Groups who violate this rule will get no more than 25% of the full marks for the assignment (or 5% out of the 20% when scaled for the full grade). Formulate your problem as an LP, making sure to describe your formulation carefully and dening all notation used in the LP. Solve your problem using: - A method you learned in class. - The optimisation software LINGO. Provide the working you have done by hand and snippets of LINGO code wherever appropriate. State the results you obtain from both solution methods. Describe and compare the results obtained. Perform sensitivity analysis on the optimal solution and provide recommendations for the company/organisation you are helping. Provide a list of references that cite ALL resources that you utilised for your report.

You will be graded on the following: - The problem, formulation and how you get from the former to the latter. (30%) - The appropriateness and accuracy in implementing the solution methods you use. (30%) - The sensitivity analysis you perform and the recommendations you give. (30%) - Proper use of language (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and the clarity of your writing. (10%)