Operation Research Minor 2 Paper

1. A student must select 4 electives from three different departments, with at least one course from each department.
The 4 courses are allocated to the three departments in a manner that maximizes "knowledge."The student measures
knowledge on a l00-point scale and comes up with the following chart:

How many courses should the student select from each of the department to maximize the knowledge that he will gain?
Solve using the Dynamic Programming Approach. 6 Marks

2. A queueing system has three servers with expected service times of 20 minutes, 15 minutes, and 10 minutes. The
service times have an exponential distribution. Each server has been busy with a current customer for 5 minutes.
Determine the expected remaining time until the next service completion.Solve by first principles. 6 Marks

3. During any period, a potential customer arrives at a certain facility with probability 0.5 If there are already two
people at the facility (including the one being served), the potential customer leaves the facility immediately and
never returns. However, if there is one person or less, he enters the facility and becomes an actual customer. The
manager of the facility has two types of service configurations available. At the beginning of each period, a decision
must be made on which configuration to use. If she uses her slow configuration at a cost of Rs.3 and any customers
are present during the period, one customer will be served and leave the facility with probability 0.6. If she uses her
fast configuration at a cost of Rs.9 and any customers are present during the period, one customer will be served
and leave the facility with probability 0.8. The probability of more than one customer arriving or more than one
customer being served in a period is zero. A profit of Rs.50 is earned when a customer is served.

(a) Formulate the problem of choosing the service configuration period by period as a Markov decision process.
Identify the states and decisions.
(b) Identify all the (stationary deterministic) policies. For each one, write the transition matrix and the reward matrix
(c) Solve the problem by the Policy Iteration Method. 7 Marks