Minimum total distance clustering and balanced distance clustering in northern Thailand's corn crop residue management system

Abstract

The authors study the corn crop residue management system for 16 provinces in northern Thailand encompassing 127 agricultural cooperatives (co-ops), 974 corn fields and 274 customers. To solve the system's problems, we find clusters where co-ops will pick up crop residues from corn fields, process them into biomass fuel and sell the fuel to customers. Each cluster consists of a co-op, a set of corn fields and a set of customers, the latter two being on separate routes from the co-op. To minimize the system's transportation cost and balance transportation cost between clusters, we propose a mathematical model with two objective functions, construct two heuristics, and apply the two heuristics to solve the problem.