The sugarcane transport system plays a critical role in the overall performance of Australia’s sugarcaneudindustry. An inefficient sugarcane transport system interrupts the raw sugarcane harvestingudprocess, delays the delivery of sugarcane to the mill, deteriorates the sugar quality, increasesudthe usage of empty bins, and leads to the additional sugarcane production costs. Due to theseudnegative effects, there is an urgent need for an efficient sugarcane transport schedule that shouldudbe developed by the rail schedulers. In this study, a multi-objective model using mixed integerudprogramming (MIP) is developed to produce an industry-oriented scheduling optimiser for sugarcaneudrail transport system. The exact MIP solver (IBM ILOG-CPLEX) is applied to minimise theudmakespan and the total operating time as multi-objective functions. Moreover, the so-called Sidingudneighbourhood search (SNS) algorithm is developed and integrated with Sidings Satisfaction Prioritiesud(SSP) and Rail Conflict Elimination (RCE) algorithms to solve the problem in a more efficientudway. In implementation, the sugarcane transport system of Kalamia Sugar Mill that is audcoastal locality about 1050 km northwest of Brisbane city is investigated as a real case study.udComputational experiments indicate that high-quality solutions are obtainable in industry-scaleudapplications.
展开▼
