This seems to me to be an application of the knapsack or bin-packing problem. Take your needed capacity for each flavor (divided into pieces of max size Z), and distribute among your machines.

This assumes that there is no cost for having multiple nozzles on a single machine (the machine needs to be scrubbed down to avoid cross contamination between the Peanut Butter Chunk and the Allergen-Free Vanilla flavors, for example ;-b ).

This may also not be an optimal solution, but, except in obnoxious cases, should get a pretty decent result.

--MidLifeXis

In reply to Re: Tricky chemicals optimization problem by MidLifeXis
in thread Tricky chemicals optimization problem by Anonymous Monk

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