Al's Dog Food Company wishes to introduce a new brand of dog biscuits (composed of chicken and liver-flavored biscuits) that meets certain nutritional requirements. The liver-flavored biscuits contain 1 unit of nutrient A and 2 units of nutrient B, while the chicken-flavored ones contain 1 unit of nutrient A and 4 units of nutrient B. According to federal requirements, there must be at least 40 units of nutrient A and 60 units of nutrient B in a package of the new biscuit mix. In addition, the company has decided that there can be no more than 15 liver-flavored biscuits in a package. If it costs 1 cent to make a liver-flavored biscuit and 2 cents to make a chicken-flavored one, what is the optimal product mix for a package of the biscuits in order to minimize the Al's cost?
a. Formulate this as a linear programming problem.
b. Identify the corner points, identify which corner point us optimalm and find the optimal solution for this problem.
c. Are any constraints redundant?
d. What is the total cost of a package of dog biscuits using the optimal mix?