CASE STUDIES

Metropolitan Police Patrol

The Metropolitan police department had recently been criticized in the local media for
not responding to police calls in the downtown area rapidly enough. In several recent
cases, alarms had sounded for break-ins, but by the time the police car arrived, the
perpetrators had left, and in one instance a store owner had been shot. Sergeant Joe Davis
had been assigned by the chief as head of a task force to find a way to determine the
optimal patrol area (dimensions) for their cars that would minimize the average time it
took to respond to a call in the downtown area.

Sergeant Davis solicited help from Angela Maris, an analyst in the operations area for the
police department. Together they began to work through the problem.

Joe noted to Angela that normal patrol sectors are laid out in rectangles, with each
rectangle including a number of city blocks. For illustrative purposes he defined the
dimensions of the sector as x in the horizontal direction and as y in the vertical direction.
He explained to Angela that cars traveled in straight lines either horizontally or vertically
and turned at right angles. Travel in a horizontal direction must be accompanied by travel
in a vertical direction, and total distance traveled is the sum of the horizontal and vertical
segments. He further noted that past research on police patrolling in urban areas had
shown that the average distance traveled by a petrol car responding to a call in either
direction was one-third of the dimensions of the sector, or x/3 or y/3. He also explained
that the travel time it took to respond to a call (assuming that a car left immediately upon
receiving the call) is simply the average distance traveled divided by the average travel
speed.

Angela told Joe that now that she understood how average travel time to a call was
determined, she could see that it was closely related to the size of the patrol area. She
asked Joe if there were any restrictions on the size of the area sectors that cars patrolled.
He responded that for their city, the department believed that the perimeter of a patrol
sector should not be less than 5 miles or exceed 12 miles. He noted several policy issues
and staffing constraints that required these specifications. Angela wanted to know if any
additional restrictions existed and Joe indicated that the distance in the vertical direction
must be at least 50% more than the horizontal distance for the sector. He explained that
laying out sectors in that manner meant that the patrol areas would have a greater
tendency to overlap different residential, income and retail areas than if they ran the other
way. He said that these areas were layered from north to south in the city. So if a sector
area were laid out east to west, all of it would tend to be in one demographic layer.

Angela indicated that she had almost enough information to develop a model, except that
she also needed to know the average travel speed the petrol cars could travel. Joe told her
that cars moving vertically traveled an average of 15 miles per hour, whereas cars

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traveled horizontally an average of 20 miles per hour. He said that the difference was due
to different traffic flows.

Develop a linear programming model for this problem and solve it by using the Graphical
Method.

The Possibility Restaurant

Angela Fox and Zooey Caulfield were food and nutrition majors at State University, as
well as close friends and roommates. Upon graduation Angela and Zooey decided to open
a French restaurant in Draperton, the small town where the university was located. There
were no other French restaurants in Draperton, and possibility of doing something new
and somewhat risky intrigued the two friends. They purchased an old Victorian home just
off Main Street for their new restaurant, which they named “The Possibility”.

Angela and Zooey knew in advance that at least initially they could not offer a full,
varied menu of dishes. They had no idea what their local customers’ taste in French
cuisine would be, so they decided to serve only two full-course meals each night, one
with beef and the other with fish. Their chef, Pierre, was confident he could make each
dish so exciting and unique that two meals would be sufficient, at least until they could
assess which menu items were most popular. Pierre indicated that with each meal he
could experiment with different appetizers, soups, salad, vegetable dishes and desserts
until they were able to identify a full selection of menu items.

The next problem for Angela and Zooey was to determine how many meals to prepare for
each night so they could shop for ingredients and set up the work schedule. They could
not afford too much waste. They estimated that they would sell a maximum of 60 meals
each night. Each fish dinner, including all accompaniments, requires 15 minutes to
prepare, and each beef dinner takes twice as long. There is a total of 20 hours of kitchen
staff labor available each day. Angela and Zooey believe that because of the health
consciousness of their potential clientele, they will sell at least three fish dinners for
every two beef dinners. However, they also believe that at least 10% of their customers
will order beef dinners. The profit from each fish dinner will be approximately $12, and
the profit from a beef dinner will be about $16.

Formulate a Linear Programming Model for Angela and Zooey that will help them
estimate the number of meals they should prepare each night and solve this model by
Simplex Method.

If Angela and Zooey increased he menu price on the fish dinner so that the profit for both
dinners was the same, what effect would that have on their solution? Suppose Angela and
Zooey reconsidered the demand for beef dinners and decided that at least 20% of their
customers would purchase beef dinners. What effect would this have on their meal
preparation plan?

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