Optimisation tool for logistics operations in silage production

Silage is one of the typical systems to preserve biomass usually oriented from corn, sor-ghum, wheat, grass, and other forage and perennial crops. A critical task within the lo-gistics operations in silage production, i.e. harvesting, transporting, and compacting, is themanagement of the biomass flow, in connection with the biomass storage system and therequired conditions of the stored product depending on its further purpose of use. A keyissue in large-scale silage production operations is the matching of the material processingcapacity of forage harvester with the material removal capacity of transport units and thematerial processing capacity of the compactor, in order to maintain a steady material flow.This allows for the optimisation of the working chain.The objective of the paper is the development of a decision support system that for agiven silage production system determines the configuration of the optimal number oftransport units in each field of an area to be harvested that minimises the total operationalcost of the production system under time constraints for the completion of the operation.The tool consists of the combination of two models, a simulation model and a linearprogramming based optimisation model. The simulation model was validated based onfield trials. The simulation model generates a series of results regarding total operatingtime and total operation cost for different configuration of the allocated transport unitsbased on machinery and field features, which results are used to build the cost matrix ofthe optimisation model. The capabilities of both the simulation model, as an individualtool, and the complete decision support tool were demonstrated. The tool provides per-formance evaluation measures that consider the interaction of the various parts of theworking chain and can be easily tuned for other silage operations with different crops. ©2019 IAgrE. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved