Australian sugar mills optimise siding rosters to increase profitability

Increasing cost/price ratios in sugarcane production and the pressure to remain internationally competitive have forced Australian sugar mills to reduce capital and operational costs. Increased utilisation of transport infrastructure through improved rostering of harvesting groups into sugarcane rail and road sidings provides an opportunity to reduce transport and harvesting costs. Generating and maintaining siding rosters manually also requires high labour costs because of the time-consuming effort to simultaneously balance limited capacities in the transportation facilities with costs of harvester movements as well as the social considerations of equity between growers. To address this complex socio-economic issue, participatory research was undertaken with a large sugar milling company in Australia to implement siding rosters that were optimised using a tabu search. This resulted in an original adoption of staff rosters produced using operations research techniques, which substantially reduced the up-front and on-going labour costs of planning and maintaining an effective roster throughout the 2002 harvest season.