Brenda Last, an undergraduate business major at State University is attempting to

determine her course schedule for the fall semester. She is considering seven 3-credit-
hour courses, which are shown in the following table. Also included are the average
number of hours she expects to have to devote to each course each week (based on
information from other students) and her minimum expected grade in each course, based
on an analysis of the grading records of the professors for each course

Course Average Hours Per Week Minimum Grade

Principles of Accounting 10 C
Corporate Finance 8 C
Quantitative Methods 12 D
Java Programming 10 D
Management I 5 B
Marketing 7 C
English Literature 8 B

An A in a course earns 4 quality credits per hour, a B earns 3 quality credits per hour, a C
earns 2 quality credits per hour, a D earns 1 quality credits per hour, and an F earns no
credits points per hour. Brenda wants to select a schedule that will provide at least a 2.0
grade average. In order to remain a full-time student, which she must do to continue
receiving financial aid, she must take at least 12 credit hours.

Principles of Accounting,
Corporate Finance,
Quantitative Methods, and
Java Programming
all require a lot of computing and mathematics, and Brenda would like to take no more
than two of these courses. To remain on schedule on schedule and meet prerequisites,
she needs to take at least three of the following courses:
Management I,
Principles of Accounting,
Java Programming, and
English Literature.

Brenda wants to develop a course schedule that will minimize the number of hours she
has to work each week.

Complete the following:

1) Identify the decision variables
2) Formulate the problem in standard form as a 0-1 integer programming model
The Decision Variables are the 7 offered courses. We’ll label them xi , i = 1,2,...7 .
Each of the 7 variables can be 0 (indicating she does not enroll) or 1 (indicating she signs
up for that class). The following table summarizes the information.

Course Course heavy pre- avg min num.

number Title math req. hrs grade grade
x m p h g
1 Management I 0 1 5 B 3
2 Principles of Accounting 1 1 10 C 2
3 Java Programming 1 1 10 D 1
4 English Literature 0 1 8 B 3
5 Corporate Finance 1 0 8 C 2
6 Quantitative Methods 1 0 12 D 1
7 Marketing 0 0 7 C 2

The LP integer programming problem is to minimize the hours, H = ∑ xi hi , subject to:

∑ xi ≥ 4 at least 12 credit hours
∑ xi pi ≥ 3 at least three prerequisites
∑ xi mi ≤ 2 no more than two heavy math classes
∑ xi gi ≥ 2.0 provide at least a 2.0 GPA

There are 128 (27) possible combinations of 7 classes. Examining each of them reveals
only 14 schedules that satisfy the above constraints. These candidate schedules are listed
below. From this list, we see the minimum number of hours is 30, which occurs for two
schedules: {Management, Accounting, English, Marketing}, and {Management, Java,
English and Marketing}.

schedule hours
1111000 33
1101100 31
1011100 31
1101010 35
1011010 35
1110001 32
1101001 30
1011001 30
0111001 35
1111001 40
1101101 38
1011101 38
1101011 42
1011011 42