Two Linear Programming Models of a Large German Federal Department

This paper is a summary report of two linear programming studies modelling the manpower stock and flow of two service branches of the German Department of Defense. Using the fundamental difference equation of manpower flow that the new stock is built up from the old stock by additions and subtractions two logically very similar LP models have been built and implemented: one describing a stationary network of about 2000 interrelated jobs to be filled by 100 000 persons and one describing a dynamic — age, rank — dependent hierarchy of about 20 000 people. Both LP’s are of size 500 to 2000 inequalities and 1000 to 2000 variables, that have been solved by the IBM-MPSX system.