A Constraint Programming Approach to Optimise Sugarcane Rail Operations

In Australia, railway systems play a vital role in transporting the sugarcane crop between farms and mills. The sugarcane transport system is very complex and uses a daily schedule, consisting of a set of locomotives runs, to satisfy the requirements of the mill and harvesters. In this paper, a more efficient sugarcane transport scheduling system is proposed to reduce the cost of sugarcane transport. A job shop scheduling approach is used to formulate this complicated system and constraint programming is applied to obtain feasibility of alternative, to deal with conflicting objectives and to produce global optimal solutions. Optimization Programming Language (OPL) is used to search for possible solutions to problems and for the best (optimal) solution based on specific criteria. A numerical investigation is presented and demonstrates that high quality solutions are obtainable for industry-scale applications