Question

The production planner for Fine Coffees, Inc. Produces two coffee blends: American (A) and British (B). He can only get 300 pounds of Colombian beans per week and 200 pounds of Dominican beans per week. Each pound of American blend coffee requires 12 ounces of Colombian beans and 4 ounces of Dominican beans, while a pound of British blend coffee uses 8 ounces of each type of bean. Profits for the American blend are $2.00 per pound, and profits for the British blend are $1.00 per pound. The goal of Fine Coffees, Inc. Is to maximize profits. What is the objective function?

Answer 1

Answer:

P=2A+B where:

A= # of pounds of American blend and

B= # of pounds of British blend

Step-by-step explanation:

This is a linear programming problem. In order to solve it we need to determine how we are going to use the provided data and we need to keep in mind what we need to maximize (or minimize depending on the problem)

So, the problem states that "The goal of Fine Coffees, Inc. Is to maximize profits." This last sentence will tell us what the objective function will be. The objective function must model the desired value we want to maximize. So the objective function should represent the profits of selling the two tipes of cofee blends.

So this is the data the problem gives us:

"He can only get 300 pounts of Colombian beans per week and 200 pounts of Dominican beans per week." This part or the problem is talking about the amount of coffee beans he can get depending on its type. This will help us find the restrictions for our linear programming problem, so they are not necessary to state the objective function. Next it states:

"Each pount of American blend cofee requires 12 oz of Colombian beans and 4 oz. of Dominican beans, while a pound of British blend coffee uses 8 oz of each type of bean." Again, this data will help us find the restrictions for our linear programming problem, since they will tell us how much coffe we can manufacture, so they are not needed to find the objective function.

The next part states: "Profits for the American blend are $2.00 per pound, and profits for the British blend are $1.00 per pound." Now, we are interested in this part since it's talking about profits, which is what we need to maximize.

We set A to be the number of pounds of American blend and B to be the number of pounds of British blend. So the profit for American blend is found by using the following equation:

$P_{American}= 2.00*A$

And the profit for the British blend is found by using the following equation:

$P_{British}= 1.00*B$

so the total profit is found by adding the two given profits, so we get:

$P_{total}=P_{American}+P_{British}$

or

$P_{total}= 2.00A+ 1.00B$

which can be simplified to:

P=2A+B

which is our objective function.