Your agency provides telephone consultation to the public from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., five days a week. The telephone load on your agency is heaviest in the months around April 15 of each year. You would like to set up staffing procedures for handling this load during these busy months. Each telephone consultant you hire starts work each day at either 7, 8, 9, 10, or 11 a.m., works for four hours, is off for one hour, and then works for another four hours. A complication that has become more noteworthy in recent years is that an increasing fraction of the calls handled by your agency is from Spanish-speaking clients. Therefore, you must have some consultants who speak Spanish.

You are able to hire two kinds of consultants: English-speaking only, and bilingual (i.e., both

English- and Spanish-speaking). A bilingual consultant can handle English and Spanish calls equally well. It should not be surprising that a bilingual consultant costs 1.1 times as much as an

English-only consultant. You have collected some data on the call load by hour of the day and language type, measured in consultants required, for one of your more important offices. These data are summarized below:

 

Hour of the day: 7   8   9   10   11   12   1   2   3   4   5   6   7

English load:       4   4   5    6    6    8    5   4   4   5   5   5   3

Spanish load:      5   5   4    3    2    3    4   3   2   1   3   4   4

 

For example, during the hour from 10 a.m. to 11a.m., you must have working at least three

Spanish-speaking consultants plus at least six more who can speak English.

 

How many consultants of each type would you start at each hour of the day?

 

Solve in Python.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

To solve this problem in Python you can use linear programming and an optimization library like PuLP ... View the full answer