ABOUT THE USE OF ARENA SIMULATING APPROACH FOR MOROCCAN SUGAR CANE HARVEST TO MILL OPTIMIZATION

The sugar cane harvest is a huge logistical operation in which millions tons of sugar cane must be cut and transported every year. This operation involves thousands of workers, dozens of cutting machines, hundreds of tractors and several hundreds of trucks and trailers all over the country. This operation must be carefully planned and coordinated to avoid the waste of valuable resources because long delays between harvesting and processing leads to deterioration in the quality of the raw materials. Simulation modelling was chosen as an appropriate mean of analysing the harvesting and transport. It has been applied here to gain insights into the relations between the various processes, the presence of bottlenecks and their causes and at the same time to optimize the resources allocated to the operation as a whole. This paper describes an application involving the simulation and optimization of a complex man-machine system that is Moroccan sugar cane harvest, in which dynamic modeling plays an important role. Simulation modelling with design of experiments, response surfaces and optimization techniques are combined in order to reach the best solution according to some measurements.