Livestock Production Planning with Batch-lines in the Agriculture Industry

With the expansion of the global population coupled with the improving quality of life in developing countries, an increasing demand of food for humans and feed for livestock are expected. Therefore, global pressures and food security issues encourage research, development and deployment of alternatives to improve the performance of the production of livestock and crops in the agriculture industry. Considering such environment, we propose a production planning optimization to be applied in livestock growth (of fish, poultry, pork, cattle, etc.) that considers the necessary feed (ration, vitamins, etc.) and number of animals (from the hatchery) to be placed into appropriate spaces (cages) or facilities (farms) for their proper growth. In the proposed livestock planning model, the placed animals are grown considering the assigned unit-places as batch-processes with limited capacity and variate time-of-growing of the livestock batches. For complex animals such as gallinaceous, swine, caprine and bovine (cattle) species, they are separated by gender to reduce the competition for feed and have comparable time-of-growth (within a range) among the live entities. The results show the batch-lines (batch-processes in lines) of production per gender and time-of-growth to be sequenced and assigned to maintain stable feed amounts in number of individuals and weights to the food processing plant.