DEVELOPING SCHEDULES FOR MIXED RAIL AND ROAD CANE TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

THIS PAPER ADDRESSES the problem of scheduling a cane transport system involving both rail transport and road transport, where the road transport operates from several sidings in the rail network. An iterative approach for scheduling the rail transport system has been developed using existing rail transport scheduling tools. The assumption that harvesters serviced by road transport are effectively operating from the rail siding from which their bins are supplied seems a reasonable starting point for the analysis. There is a need to manually modify the schedule to take into account the road transport schedule to ensure that full bins are not collected before the road transport system delivers them back to the rail siding. A road transport scheduler has been developed to determine the number of trucks required, to assign trucks to rail sidings and determine a road transport schedule to limit the number of field bins required. Field bins are cane bins stored at the road transport pads and filled by harvesters while waiting for trucks to deliver new empty bins from the rail siding and return the full bins back to the rail siding.