A decision support system for scheduling the harvesting and wine making processes at a winery

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Technological advances made over the past century have had a major impact on traditionalwineries. Software solutions for management issues are widely available and give rise to theprospect of computerized decision support systems assisting in various aspects of managing awinery. The most popular applications seem to be concerned with supply chain managementor harvest scheduling. Such projects are under way all over the globe and great success hasbeen achieved to this e ect. However, prior to this study no such project has been consideredin South Africa.The phrase active cellar scheduling problem refers to the assignment of grape batches to processorsinside the cellar where bottlenecks often occur during the busy harvesting period. Thephrase harvest scheduling problem, on the other hand, refers to selecting the best possible datesto harvest the respective vineyard blocks in order to preserve grape quality.A mixed integer programming model for the active cellar scheduling problem is derived inthis thesis, but proves to be too time consuming to solve exactly via the branch-and-boundmethod. A meta-heuristic tabu search approach is therefore designed to solve the problemapproximately instead. When applied to a small,ctitious cellar, it is found that the tabusearch method often solves the problem optimally. The computer processing time associatedwith the tabu search approach also constitutes a signi cant (often thousand-fold) improvementover that of the branch-and-bound approach for realistically sized problem instances.A generic tabu search is also designed to solve the over-arching harvest scheduling problem fora general winery. This schedule is found by referring to the smaller tabu search of the activecellar scheduling in order to verify the impact that harvesting moves have on activities in thecellar. One harvesting schedule is considered a better schedule than another when it has a lowerharvest evaluation score, determined by the placement of the vineyard blocks in the harvestingschedule. The harvest evaluation score takes into account the combination of vineyard blocksselected for harvesting on the same day (and their e ect on the active cellar) as well as theripeness and quality of the grapes.Both tabu searches arenally included in a exible, computerized decision support system,called VinDSS. This system is found to produce good harvesting schedules when comparedto an actualve day schedule during the 2009 harvesting period at Wamakersvallei, a wineryserving as case study for this thesis.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University