A flow-shop problem formulation of biomass handling operations scheduling

Currently, the planning of the biomass collection operations is performed relying on the contractor's experience without the use of any dedicated planning tool. It is expected that more explicitly formulated planning tools would provide benefits on securing the supply chain of biomass feedstock. In this study, the problem of finding a permutation schedule for a number of geographically dispersed fields where biomass handling operations have to be carried out involving a number of sequential tasks, was formulated as a flow shop with sequence depended set up times scheduling problems as known in the industrial domain. By applying the approach to a case study involving experimental recording of the operations executions, the execution of an optimal schedule was found to give a reduction of 9.8% in the total time as compared to a schedule based on the tacit knowledge of the operations manager. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.