Ed Butler is the production manager for the Bilco Corporation, which produces three types of spare parts for automobiles.

The manufacture of each part requires processing on each of two machines, with the following processing times (in hours):

Ed wants to determine the mix of spare parts to produce in order to maximize total profit.

(a) Formulate a linear programming model for this problem.

(b) Display the model on an Excel spreadsheet.

c) Make three guesses of your own choosing for the optimal solution. Use the spreadsheet to check each one for feasibility and, if feasible, to find the value of the objective function.
Which feasible guess has the best objective function value?

(d) Use the Excel Solver to solve the model by the simplex method.