Operations Management

Lecture-5

1
 Locating telecom towers
A telecom company needs to build a set of cell towers to provide signal coverage for the inhabitants of a given city. A number
of potential locations where the towers could be built have been identified. This example considers a bipartite graph for 6
towers and 7 regions. The following table illustrates which regions (columns) are covered by each cell tower site (rows).
Region 1 Region 2 Region 3 Region 4 Region 5 Region 6 Region 7
Tower 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0
Tower 2 1 0 0 0 0 1 1
Tower 3 0 0 1 1 0 0 0
Tower 4 0 0 1 0 1 0 0
Tower 5 1 0 1 0 0 1 1
Tower 6 0 0 0 1 0 0 1
The population at each region is stated in the following table.
Region 1 Region 2 Region 3 Region 4 Region 5 Region 6 Region 7
Population 523 690 420 1010 1200 850 400
The cost to build a cell tower at each location site is stated in the following table.
Cost (millions of USD)
Tower 1 4.2 a) Where all should the towers be erected for minimum fixed cost while
Tower 2 6.1 serving all the regions?
Tower 3 5.2
Tower 4 5.5 b) If the allocated budget for installation of towers is $9,000,000, which
Tower 5 4.8
Tower 6 9.2
towers will you erect to cover the maximum population?
 Optimal number of roses to stock
A flower vendor purchases roses at INR 10 per piece, and sells them at INR 20 per piece. The unsold flowers have to be sold in
the scrap market @ INR 4 per piece. If the following is the probability distribution of the demand of roses, what quantity of
roses should the vendor ideally stock?
Demand 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
Prob 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.05 0.07 0.15 0.25 0.2 0.12 0.05 0.03