Answer to Question 1
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).
Answer to Question 2
A