Analyzing an emergency maintenance system in the agriculture stage of a Brazilian sugarcane mill using an approximate hypercube method.

Abstract

In this paper, we present and apply an approximate hypercube queuing method to analyze an emergency maintenance system within the agricultural stage of Brazil’s sugarcane industry. We incorporate differentiated service rates in the approximate hypercube method to deal with significant travel times as well as partial backup and priority in queue to mimic the dispatch policies of the system. We then applied this method using data from a case study conducted in an existing sugar and alcohol mill. We also investigated an alternative scenario for this system, as proposed by the company‘s managers, whereby the number of servers increases. The results showed that the method is an efficient way to investigate the original configuration as well as an alternative scenario for the case study. Furthermore, the method might be useful in larger applications and/or similar agro-industries.