I.

Metropolitan Police Patrol

Introduction

A police department is a police force that serves a city, region, or state. They are typically responsible for
ensuring public safety, enforcing the law, investigating, and preventing illegal activity. However, the
Metropolitan Police Department was recently criticized in the local media for not responding to police
calls in the downtown area rapidly enough. As a result, Sergeant Joe Davis was assigned by the chief to
find a way to determine the optimal patrol area for their cars that would minimize the average time it
took to respond to a call in the downtown area. Sergeant Joe Davis work through the problem along
with the help from Angela Maris, an analyst in the operations area for the police department. He then
further explained to Angela Maris the patrol's typical protocol as well as some other relevant
information concerning the problem.

With all of the discussions, Angela indicated that she had almost enough information to develop a
model. A linear programming model will be developed for this problem in order for the patrol to have
improvements in responding to police calls in the downtown.

Discussion

The linear programming model can be applied to the problem of generating optimal police patrol areas
with the following formulation:

Minimize Z = x/60 + y/45

Subject to:

2x + 2y ≥ 5

2x + 2y ≤ 12

Y ≥ 1.5 x

x, y ≥ 0