Metro Real Estate recently acquired a building site to develop rental apartments. The complex will consist of a mix of studio apartments and duplexes. The site is zoned for a maximum building size of 20,000 square feet and Metro has budgeted $8M dollars for construction. Studio apartments are 800 square feet and cost $300,000 to build. Duplex apartments are 1,200 square feet and cost $700,000 to build. The architects can design a building with any mix of studio and duplex apartments. Metro estimates that the monthly income on studio apartments will be $2,000 while the monthly income on duplex apartments will be $3,800.

To aid in their project planning, management at Metro developed an optimization model using Solver in Excel to help determine the optimal configuration for the building.