Integrated of harvesting and production planning in aromatic coconut supply chain using mixed-integer linear programming

Abstract

This paper presents an operations research technique that can be used for a supply chain design with a goal of manufacturing aromatic coconuts for an export as cheap as possible. The production planning of the aromatic coconut supply chain was studied for an exporting company in Samut Sakhon province in Thailand. The planning focused on the forwarding of the aromatic coconuts to the production plant from the harvested areas in which they were classified into two groups: 1) the self-owned areas; 2) the contracted areas, or from the traders. The flow of decisions making associated with the aromatic coconuts in the plant and how the coconuts got delivered and stored to satisfy the demand. A mixed-integer linear programming model was proposed to describe the optimisation of the problem and to propose a realistic planning model of the aromatic coconuts for the exporting company. The analysis of the optimisation results and the comparison with traditional planning shows that the proposed model can help the production operator save up to approximately 11.32% of the operational cost. In addition, the model can be applied to estimate the coconut processing capacity of the facility to establish future sales policies.