Q.A company manufactures two types of screws A and B. All the screws have to pass through a threading machine and a slotting machine. A box of Type A screws requires 2 minutes on the threading machine and 3 minutes on the slotting machine. A box of type B screws requires 8 minutes of threading on the threading machine and 2 minutes on the slotting machine. In a week, each machine is available for 60 hours. On selling these screws, the company gets a profit of Rs 100 per box on type A screws and Rs 170 per box on type B screws. Formulate this problem as a LPP given that the objective is to maximise profit.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →This is a linear programming problem where we maximise profit subject to time constraints on two machines: (threading), (slotting), with .
Why this is a Linear Programming Problem
Linear Programming (LP) is used when you have a linear objective (profit, cost, etc.) to maximise or minimise, subject to linear constraints (limited resources, time, materials). Here, the company has two limited resources — threading machine time and slotting machine time — and wants to decide how many boxes of each screw type to produce to get the highest profit.
The key insight: every box of screws consumes a fixed amount of time on each machine. The total time used cannot exceed what's available. This naturally gives us inequalities.
Step-by-step formulation
1. Define the decision variables
Let = number of boxes of Type A screws produced per week.
Let = number of boxes of Type B screws produced per week.
These are the quantities we can control. They cannot be negative, so , .
2. Write the objective function (profit)
Profit per box of A = Rs 100, per box of B = Rs 170.
Total profit .
We want to maximise .
3. Identify the constraints from machine time
First, convert hours to minutes — both machines are available for 60 hours per week.
minutes.
Threading machine constraint:
- Type A: 2 minutes per box → minutes total
- Type B: 8 minutes per box → minutes total
- Total threading time used:
- This cannot exceed 3600 minutes:
Slotting machine constraint:
- Type A: 3 minutes per box → minutes total
- Type B: 2 minutes per box → minutes total
- Total slotting time used:
- This cannot exceed 3600 minutes: …
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