Integrated planning decisions in the broiler chicken supply chain

Abstract

In the poultry industry, the meat market requires a careful coordination of the broiler chicken supply chain comprising breeders, hatcheries, farms, slaughterhouses, wholesale, and retail vendors. Aside from the inherent challenges of coordinating a supply chain, animal husbandry systems face additional complex tasks. The lack of integrated decisions within the poultry chain could lead to a production plan that (a) does not comply with the biosecurity standards required in meat production for human consumption at the farms; (b) violates the production and inventory capacities at the slaughterhouses; and (c) does not meet the demand of customers. To streamline the supply chain, we propose a mixed‐integer linear programming model that supports production planning and scheduling decisions in broiler chicken production facilities. In addition, we embedded the mixed‐integer programming model in a rolling‐horizon scheme to improve scalability and to avoid the myopic effect of time‐indexed optimization models that put too much emphasis on a specific time period. We present the results of a case study in a poultry company in Santa Marta (Colombia), where we reach profit improvements that range from 7% to 57% with a reduction in inventory costs that range from 30% to 60%, while simultaneously meeting stringent technical, tactical, and biosecurity constraints.

Supply Chains: Planning the Transportation of Animals among Facilities

“…For instance, metaheuristics and simheuristics have been proven to be useful in solving large optimization problems [34]. Similar problems were detected by authors in the broiler production [17,18] and the proposed the use of heuristics to reach satisfactory solutions near optimality.…”

“…Similar production planning problems appear in other livestock species with similar supply chain organizations, such as broiler production [17,18]. Ref.…”

“…Ref. [18] dealt with a similar problem in identifying breeders, hatcheries, farms, and abattoirs as the main agents in the supply chain. Ref.…”

A socially responsible decision‐making model for firms contracting with constrained farmers

“…Recently, Solano‐Blanco et al. (2023) used mixed‐integer linear programming (MILP) model to solve an integrated production planning and scheduling problem in a coordinated (chicken) SC. Hierarchical and integrated OR techniques have recently been employed to solve zone delineation and selective harvest schedule (Albornoz et al., 2021).…”

Dynamic scheduling of a picking robot with limited buffer and rejection: an industrial case study

“…Making such complex decisions appropriately requires advanced optimization approaches. Such approaches often perform well for complex industrial decision processes such as integrated decisions (Solano-Blanco et al, 2020), multiple objectives (Bissoli et al, 2021), or when random event disturb the plan (He and Tan, 2020). In a multirobot context, Briand et al (2018) formalize the pick-and-place scheduling problem (PPSP).…”