Modeling and solving a sugarcane harvest front scheduling problem

Abstract

Sugarcane harvest front scheduling is a complex process that affects the main activities of sugarmill supply logistics and it should simultaneously consider the available harvest and transport capacities, which are sometimes neglected. This paper models this scheduling problem, exploring an analogy to the well-known general lotsizing and scheduling problem with parallel production lines, and presents a heuristic method to solve it, involving an aggregation process, a constructive MIP heuristic based on relax-and-fix and an improving MIP heuristic based on fix-and-optimize. This optimization approach is applied to solve a large-sized real problem instance of a Brazilian mill whole season. To validate the approach, a validation process of the literature is applied by consulting a selected group of Brazilian harvest planning specialists. The results highlight the potential of the approach and how it can change the current harvest planning practices, enabling plans that consider the balance of harvest and transport capacities without using sectorization.