To illustrate Excel Solver I will consider Hillier & Lieberman's reasonably well known example, the Wyndor Glass Co. problem (Hillier & Lieberman, 1995). The problem concerns a glass manufacturer which uses three production plants to assemble its products, mainly glass doors (x1) and wooden frame windows (x2). Each product requires different times in the three plants and there are certain restrictions on available production time at each plant. With this information and a knowledge of contributions to profit of the two products the management of the company wish to determine what quantities of each product they should be producing in order to maximise profits. In other words, the Wyndor Glass Co. problem is a classic, albeit very simple, product-mix problem.
The problem is formulated as the following linear program:
max z = 3x1 + 2x2 (objective)
subject to x1