Simulation and optimization of sugar cane transportation in harvest season

Cuba is one of the world's major sugar producers, producing on average more than five millions tons per year. The sugar cane harvest is a huge logistical operation in which between 45 and 50 millions tons of sugar cane must be cut and transported every year. This operation involves thousands of workers, dozens of cutting machines, hundreds of tractors and several hundreds of trucks and trailers all over the country. This operation must be carefully planned and coordinated to avoid the waste of valuable resources. Simulation has been applied to gain insights into the relations between the various processes, the presence of bottlenecks and their causes and at the same time to optimize the resources allocated to the operation as a whole. This paper describes an application involving the simulation and optimization of a complex man-machine system that is sugar cane harvest, in which dynamic modeling plays an important role. Simulation modeling with design of experiments, response surfaces and optimization techniques are combined in order to reach the best solution according to some measurements.