Solving Resource Allocation Problems using PuLP in Python: Step-by-Step Tutorial

Dr. Soumen Atta, Ph.D.
6 min readApr 4, 2023
Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash

Resource allocation problems arise in various real-world scenarios, such as production planning, project management, and scheduling. Linear programming is a powerful tool for solving such problems. PuLP is a Python library that provides a user-friendly interface to create and solve linear programming models.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to use PuLP to solve a resource allocation problem. Specifically, we will consider the following problem:

  • We have three resources: labor, materials, and machines.
  • We have three tasks that require different amounts of resources:
  • We have a limited amount of each resource available:
  • We want to maximize the total profit of completing the tasks. Each task has a different profit:

Problem formulation

We can formulate this problem as a linear programming problem with the following decision variables:

  • x1: the number of times…

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Dr. Soumen Atta, Ph.D.

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of IT, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. You can find more about me on my homepage: https://www.soumenatta.com/