Question 3) (40 points) Consider a transportation problem. There are a set of suppliers and a set of customers in a region. The customers have their known demand of a specific product. Suppliers have supply capacities for the product. An operations manager wants to make shipment decisions, i.e., how many items to ship from each supplier to each customer, subject to the demand requirements and supply capacities. The demand and supply information are presented below. Table 1 171 ml 90 2016 U16 N mo Customer Supply Supplier 2 3 Capacity 10 10 50 B 9 50 10 7 50 D 10 8 5 50 We want to determine a shipment plan to satisfy customer's demand in the month of April. We do not have demand information for April. But we have historical demand data for the previous 11 months for each of the customers. Toble 2 Demand Period Month Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3 1 May 48 55 30 2 June 46 47 45 3 July 43 33 4 August 58 60 60 5 September 52 54 62 6 October 54 46 67 7 November 65 45 69 8 December 69 44 99 9 January 71 55 102 10 February 74 44 107 11 March 75 33 103 53 a) Apply the following three forecasting models to predict April's demand for each customer. i) 4-month moving average ii) Exponential Smoothing with a = 0.4 iii) Trend Line (regression) Answer: Toble 3 April Demand Forecast Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3 4 Month Moving Average Exponential Smoothing Trend Line (Regression) b) Use Mean Squared Error (MSE) evaluation method to select the best forecasting model for each customer. Report MSE of each forecasting model for each customer. Answer: Table 4 Mean Squared Error (MSE) Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3 4 Month Moving Average Exponential Smoothing Trend Line (Regression) c) For each customer, put April's prediction of the best model in the table below: Toble 5 Customer 2 1 3 April Demand