Abstract
Many research works have being carried out on analyzing grain storage facility costs; however a few of them had taken into account the analysis of factors associated to all pre-processing and storage steps. The objective of this work was to develop a decision support system for determining the grain storage facility costs and utilization fees in grain storage facilities. The data of a CONAB storage facility located in Ponta Grossa - PR, Brazil, was used as input of the system developed to analyze its specific characteristics, such as amount of product received and stored throughout the year, hourly capacity of drying, cleaning, and receiving, and dispatch. By applying the decision support system, it was observed that the reception and expedition costs were exponentially reduced as the turnover rate of the storage increased. The cleaning and drying costs increased linearly with grain initial moisture. The storage cost increased exponentially as the occupancy rate of the storage facility decreased.
Highlights
Storage units are structures designed and managed to perform unit operations such as reception, cleaning, drying, storage and dispatch
This work aims at developing a decision support system with access to the Internet to determine the costs and rates of unit operations regarding reception, cleaning, drying, storage and dispatch of grains in storage facilities
The price of rice practiced by CONAB was close to the value determined in this study; the same was not true for other products
Summary
Storage units are structures designed and managed to perform unit operations such as reception, cleaning, drying, storage and dispatch. In service units, such as cooperatives and general stores, transactions rates are billed per ton of product. It is assumed that these rates should be established to cover the costs of infrastructure, labor, energy, taxes, insurance, and a return on the capital invested. According to FIELD et al (2007), the determination of costs is relevant to the engineering analysis and management of the process, being a basis for decision-making. There are several methods of cost estimation, and among them is the economic engineering method, which is based on the relationship between the inputs used and the products produced
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