Programação das frentes de colheita de cana-de-açúcar: uma modelagem visando o equilíbrio das capacidades de colheita e transporte

Abstract

The production of sugar, ethanol and electricity from sugar cane necessarily involves harvesting and transportation of raw materials, which are expensive and complex operations and have significant influence on the quality of the industrial raw material. The literature reports several optimization approaches related to the planning of planting, harvesting and transporting of sugarcane, however the scheduling of harvesting fronts is underexplored. This thesis intends to contribute to the state-of-art of this important issue in the context of the Brazilian agribusiness. Optimization approaches to support scheduling decisions of harvesting fronts considering the balance of harvesting and transportation capacities, as well as good agronomic management are proposed. The approaches are inspired by the representation of the problem as a lot sizing and scheduling model with parallel machines and sequence-dependent setup costs and times, a modelling technique well studied in the production planning and control literature. Three variants of this formulation, based on mathematical programming models, were developed and tested in two real case studies of medium size sugar mills. Heuristic methods based on aggregation procedures and mathematical programming have also been studied and developed to solve large scaled problems found in practice. Among the three variants studied, one presented the best solution quality within the expected execution time. Important scenario analysis were done indicating that the schedule s fulfilment provides reduction of harvesting and transporting complexity to the following season, which can generate significant saves in the cases studied. Besides that, comparing the proposed scheduling method with one of the sector s practice, it can be generated also significant cost reduction in the cases studied. The results were analyzed according to a validation methodology (descriptive facet of tetraedrum) well known in the literature.