Optimal trading and shipping of agricultural commodities
研究了一家农产品中间商如何通过联合规划交易、仓储和运输来最大化利润，基于南美最大谷物交易商Los Grobo的实际数据建模，对农业供应链从业者和研究者有参考价值。
We develop and implement a model for a profit maximizing firm that provides an intermediation service between commodity producers and commodity end-users. We are motivated by the grain intermediation business at Los Grobo—one of the largest commodity-trading firms in South America. Producers and end-users are distributed over a realistic spatial network, and trade with the firm through contracts for delivery of grain during the marketing season. The firm owns spatially distributed storage facilities, and begins the marketing season with a portfolio of prearranged purchase and sale contracts with upstream and downstream counterparts. The firm aims to maximize profits while satisfying all previous commitments, possibly through the execution of new transactions. Under realistic constraints for capacities, network structure and shipping costs, we identify the optimal trading, storing and shipping policy for the firm as the solution of a profit-maximizing optimization problem, encoded as a minimum cost flow problem in a time-expanded network that captures both geography and time. We perform extensive numerical examples and show significant efficiency gains derived from the joint planning of logistics and trading.