Sugarcane Harvest Logistics in Brazil

Abstract

Sugar mills in Brazil represent significant capital investments. To maintain appropriate returns on their investment, sugar companies seek to run the mills at capacity over the entire nine months of the sugarcane harvest season. Because the sugar content of cane degrades considerably once it is cut, maintaining inventories of cut cane is undesirable. Instead, mills want to coordinate the arrival of cut cane with production. In this paper, we present a model of the sugarcane harvest logistics problem in Brazil. We introduce a series of valid inequalities for the model, introduce heuristics for finding an initial feasible solution, and for lifting the lower bound. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the inequalities and heuristics. In addition, we explore the value of allowing trucks to serve multiple rather than single locations and demonstrate the value of allowing the harvest speed to vary.

Sugarcane harvest logistics

“…A lack of coordination among the decision makers affects the efficiency of the whole system. For a more detailed discussion of the literature, specially on the other objective functions used in the sugarcane harvest and transportation models and the discussion on the literature related to the infrastructure different from those in the US and Australia, we refer the reader to Lamsal et al [2013a].…”

“…In Section 4.5, we present the results of two computational studies using our model. The first study uses the benchmark problems developed by Lamsal et al [2013a]. These benchmark datasets use publicly available data on the geographical locations of each of Louisiana's 456 sugarcane farms and 11 sugarcane mills as well as their production and processing rates to construct a set of 11 sugarcane logistics problems (one for each of the 11 mills in Louisiana).…”

A hybrid approach combining interior-point and branch-and-bound methods applied to the problem of sugar cane waste

“…Jena and Poggi (2013) used preprocessing techniques and hot start associated with heuristic solutions to solve a mixed-integer programming model and investigate the sugar cane cultivation and harvesting planning. Lamsal et al (2013) presented a mixed-integer linear programming model of the sugar cane harvest logistic problems in Brazil. Silva et al (2013) proposed a multi-choice mixed-integer goal programming model for the aggregate production planning of a Brazilian sugar and ethanol milling company.…”

A Combination of Discrete Event Simulation and Multi-Criteria Analysis to Configure Sugarcane Drop and Hook Delivery Systems

“…An important challenge is how to coordinate the discrete arrivals of the loaded trucks and the continuous processes of the mills, which is commonly resolved by keeping sugarcane stock. However, owing to the perishability, this stock should be processed as soon as possible to avoid quality loss (Iannoni & Morabito, 2006;Higgins & Davies, 2005;Silva et al, 2011;Lamsal et al, 2017).…”

“…The decision-making process regarding the use of a D&H system is verified by considering a set of performance indicators reported in literature as criteria: fleet costs (Iannoni & Morabito, 2006;Silva et al, 2011), time spent by vehicles in transit (Iannoni & Morabito, 2006;Higgins & Davies, 2005;Silva et al, 2011;Lamsal et al, 2017), and the risk associated with a shortage of sugarcane to supply the mill (Junqueira & Morabito, 2017). Even though a small number of criteria is analysed, their impact on the continuity of the system is of extreme importance as competitiveness in the commodities sector is driven by price.…”