A construction company has 6 projects, for each they need $d_i$ workers. The company has no workers at the beginning of project 1.
Each new worker must take a safety course that costs 300, and 50 more for each worker. If there is no new worker there is no course.
Firing a worker does not cost any money, and a workers can't be rehired.
Given that the salary of a worker is 100 per project, formulate a linear programming problem that minimizes the workers costs.
What I tried:
Let $x_i$ be the number of new workers for project $i$.
Let $y_i$ be the number of old workers remaining from previous projects until project $i$ (all the workers hired - all the workers that were fired)
Let $z_i$ be an indicator such that $z_i =0 \iff x_i>0$
The function I'm trying to solve is:
$\min(\sum_{i=1}^6 150x_i + 300(1-z_i) + 100y_i)$
s.t: \begin{align} x_i,y_i,z_i &\ge 0 \\ z_i &\ge 1-x_i \\ y_i + x_i &\ge d_i \\ y_i &\ge y_{i-1} + x_i \end{align}
Something feels not right to me. The main reason is that I tried to use matlab to solve this and it failed.
What did I do wrong? How can I solve this question?
