Model Predictive Control Based Planning in the Fruit Industry

BLANCO ANÍBAL M.; MASINI GUILLERMO L.; PETRACCI NOEMÍ C.; BANDONI J. ALBERTO

Lyon, Francia

Congreso; 18th Europeam Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering, ESCAPE 18; 2007

ESCAPE

Typical Fruit Industry Supply Chains are highly interconnected networks conformed by farms, packaging plants, cold storage facilities and concentrated juice plants along with clients and third party raw material and services suppliers. The operational planning of such a chain should seek to respond to the before-the-season established product delivery commitments rather than to react in the face of “on-line” customer demand as in classic chains. In this contribution the operational planning of a typical fruit industry supply chain is addressed by means of a Model Predictive Control based scheme which is a model based control strategy that shows attractive features for multivariable, highly interacting, uncertain systems. This methodology naturally allows addressing the meaningful uncertainty in the system parameters and the possibility of supply chain disruption episodes.