Paper Info
Title
Scheduling of road vehicles in sugarcane transport: A case study at an Australian sugar mill
Abstract
Pressure to remain internationally competitive has forced Australian sugar mills to reduce capital and operational costs. Improved scheduling of road transport vehicles provides one such opportunity, as it would reduce vehicle queue and mill idle times and hence the number of vehicles needed. It is difficult for mill traffic officers to produce good transport schedules manually due to the need to service a large number of harvesters in different locations. To address this issue, research was undertaken participatively with a sugar milling company in Australia to produce and implement a mixed integer programming model that represents the road transport operations. Two meta-heuristics were applied to find a solution to the model, leading to potential cost savings of AU$240,000 per year versus schedules produced manually by the mill traffic officer. The model was also applied to explore regional planning options for a more integrated harvesting and transport system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1016/j.ejor.2004.07.055
European Journal of Operational Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Agriculture,Vehicle scheduling,Tabu search,Participatory research
Mill,Capital cost,Idle,Scheduling (computing),Regional planning,Queue,Integer programming,Schedule,Operations management,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
170
3
0377-2217
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
12
0.96
5
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrew J. Higgins112917.59