Integration of process planning and scheduling for aquaculture

Abstract

              Aquaculture rotation is a continuous operation in which harvesting decisions affect factors such as payoff, product size/growth, and the starting of new crops. To maximize overall returns, a manager has to balance the returns from cycling a new crop after harvesting the current one. The situation becomes more complicated when dealing with high numbers of small-scale farmers and year-round demand variation from month to month. In this study, a heuristic based on a GA for multi-aquaculture, multicrop production, and polyculture for restocking and harvesting decisions (with an objective of profit maximization) is developed. Scenarios of low, medium, and high demand are set to demonstrate the mechanism of the proposed plan compared with the conventional unsynchronized restocking and harvesting method.