Sugarcane harvest logistics

Sugar mills represent significant capital investments. To maintain appropriate returns on their investment, sugar companies seek to run the mills at capacity over the sugarcane harvest season. Because the sugar content of cane degrades considerably once it is cut, maintaining inventories of cut cane is undesirable. Instead, mills want to coordinate the arrival of cut cane with production. We present exact solution approaches exploiting special structure of the sugarcane harvest logistics problem in Brazil and the United States.