Scheduling of road vehicles in sugarcane transport: A case study at an Australian sugar mill

Pressure to remain internationally competitive has forced Australian sugar mills to reduce capital and operational costs. Improved scheduling of road transport vehicles provides one such opportunity, as it would reduce vehicle queue and mill idle times and hence the number of vehicles needed. It is difficult for mill traffic officers to produce good transport schedules manually due to the need to service a large number of harvesters in different locations. To address this issue, research was undertaken participatively with a sugar milling company in Australia to produce and implement a mixed integer programming model that represents the road transport operations. Two meta-heuristics were applied to find a solution to the model, leading to potential cost savings of AU$240,000 per year versus schedules produced manually by the mill traffic officer. The model was also applied to explore regional planning options for a more integrated harvesting and transport system.