Monday, January 27, 2014

Cleaning Litter: Limiting Factors

There are certain factors that effect how much trash in the Audubon can be collected, this is my attempt to go step by step to try and maximize their efforts.

The Audubon is trying to maximize the amount of animals they save . When maximizing the animals we save, we have to consider the things the Audubon can control about saving these animals. They can control how many people they let volunteer pick up litter and the amount of people they let work on creating Burrowing Owl nests. It cost approximately $25 per burrow and 33 cents per garbage bag. We can represent the animals saved by: A<B+L (A=animals saved, B= Burrows, L=Bags of Litter Collected).

The amount of volunteers assigned to collect litter and the amount assigned to create burrows changes the amount of animals potentially saved, because we're assuming (this may not be accurate because I'm just estimating here) that one burrow (B) saves 4 owls (two adults and two offspring), and that one bag of litter (L) saves 1 animal. If we have more people collecting litter, we have more people creating owl burrows, and getting rid of one of these programs is not optimal. 

The limits the Audubon has are: the amount of volunteers that show up (let's assume it's 20 each time for our purposes), that there's two tasks needing to be completed, and that they have to do this once a month for three hours (36 hours a year). My decision variables affect the limiting factors because we could have unlimited volunteers, but we only have 36 hours a year devoted to picking up litter and creating owl burrows. Within two hours, three bags of litter can be collected per volunteer, whilst three owl owl burrows can be created. Each burrow takes approximately 3 volunteers, while one bag of litter takes 1. We're going to assume that the budget is $100.

As a set of inequalities (L=Bags of litter collected, B=Burrows created, A=Animals saved, V=Volunteers, H= Hours, M=Money)

100(M)> 25B+ .33L    
20(V)> 3B+L
36(H)> B+L

Currently, they can allocate more people to different areas of work to save more animals, but they can't get rid of one of the programs. 

My corner points were: 0,0; 4,0; 3.89, 8.33; 0,20

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