Modelling corn silage harvest logistics for a cost optimization approach
2015
Amiama, Carlos | Pereira, José M. | Castro Rubio, Angel Augusto | Bueno, Javier
Harvesting corn silage requires balancing the capacities for harvest, transport, and storage operations to eliminate bottlenecks.The overall goal of this paper is to simulate the silage harvest system in order to provide the technicians with a decision support tool. This tool will be useful when performing both the strategic planning at the beginning of the harvest season, and in daily decision making, in order to determine the right combination of resources according to fields to harvest. A model was constructed to evaluate the handling system comprising the harvest, transport and packing of forage intended for corn silage.In order to provide a real example of the usefulness for strategic planning by the tool developed, the harvesting of 590 fields of corn silage in a region of NW Spain was simulated. The model obtained provided a value of 27 trucks to obtain lower harvesting costs if 6-row SPFH were used and 33 trucks with 8-row SPFH. The proper packer capacity at the silo was 3.35tmin−1. The impact that the matching of equipment has on the costs and on the length of the harvest season for each of the harvesters analyzed was more significant with 8-row SPFH. If the number of trucks is less than 30, a 6-row SPFH is more cost efficient than an 8-row SPFH. On the other hand if the number is greater, then the use of the 8-row SPFH would incur lower costs. The harvesting process is more sensitive to changes in the packing capacity than to the number of trucks used relative to the optimum value determined.
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