Minimum total distance clustering and balanced distance clustering in Northern Thailand's corn crop residue management system

摘要

The authors study the corn crop residue management system for 16 provinces in northern Thailand which encompasses 127 agricultural cooperatives (co-ops), 974 corn fields and 274 customers. To solve the system's problems, we find clusters where co-ops will pick up crop residues from corn fields, process them into it biomass fuel and sell the fuel to customers. Each cluster consists of a co-op, a set of corn fields and a set of customers, the latter two being on separate routes from the co-op. To minimize the system's transportation cost and balance transportation cost between clusters, we propose mathematical model and apply two modified heuristics.