Zipco Printing operates a shop that has five printing machines. The machines differ in their capacities to perform various printing operations due to differences in the machines' designs and operator skill levels. At the start of the workday there are five printing jobs to schedule. The manager must decide what the job-machine assignments should be

a. How could a quantitative approach to decision making be used to solve this problem?
b. What would be the uncontrollable inputs for which data must be collected?
c. Define the decision variables, objective function, and constraints to appear in the mathematical model.
d. Is the model deterministic or stochastic?
e. Suggest some simplifying assumptions for this problem.

a. A quantitative approach to decision making can provide a systematic way for deciding the job-machine pairings so that total job processing time is minimized.
b. How long it takes to process each job on each machine, and any job-machine pairings that are unacceptable.
c. Decision variables: one for each job-machine pairing, taking on a value of 1 if the pairing is used and 0 otherwise.
Objective function: minimize total job processing time.
Constraints: each job is assigned to exactly one machine, and each machine be assigned no more than one job.
d. Stochastic: job processing times vary due to varying machine set-up times, variable operator performance, and more.
e. Assume that processing times are deterministic (known/fixed).