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