A question using Excel Solver
July 9, 2019 8:03 AM   Subscribe

Hello, I've been experimenting with excel Solver to solve a scheduling problem, but I can't get it to work even the simplest solution. Any ideas?

The problem is simple. Here is the excel sheet:
There are two teams
Team A and Team B
Every week needs 5 people on team A and 4 people on team B
I'd like everyone to have as equal as possible a ratio between A:B.

The problem HAS a solution (I've made it below), so why can't solver find it?
posted by cacofonie to Computers & Internet (1 answer total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Basically, because you're solving a problem with (a) a large number — 81 — of (b) binary inputs, for which (c) your objective function is non-smooth. All three of these attributes increase the amount of computing power required to solve the problem; it would be much easier to solve if you had fewer possible inputs, the inputs could be any real number, and the objective function didn't have a "cusp" at zero due to the use of the absolute value function.

The Solver documentation goes into a bit more detail about this:
posted by Johnny Assay at 11:44 AM on July 9, 2019 [1 favorite]


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