This is incredibly helpful thanks so much for answering. I read up on these problems you listed and they are exactly the right area I need to look at. For my issue, the goal actually is to reduce to the fewest nozzles possible. This is because when you have mutiple nozzles on a machine everytime one nozzle runs the others have to run which wastes a lot of money... thats just how the system works ( if we leave the ice cream anaology behind). Given that each flavor ( or chemical) must have its own nozzle, how would I incorporate this extra dimension?

As a follow on...are there any modules or existing perl help to get me get this coded?

In reply to Re^2: Tricky chemicals optimization problem by Anonymous Monk
in thread Tricky chemicals optimization problem by Anonymous Monk

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