Potential Benefits of Reverse Blending in the Fertilizer Industry
Delayed differentiation, one of the key techniques of mass customization, has proven to be a high-performance strategy in the discrete industry. In the process industry, however, it remains poorly explored, especially when differentiation relates to produ
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EMINES School of Industrial Management, UM6P, Benguerir, Morocco {Latifa.Benhamou,Pierre.Fenies, Vincent.Giard}@emines.um6p.ma 2 Paris II Panthéon Assas University, Paris, France 3 University Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University, Paris, France
Abstract. Delayed differentiation, one of the key techniques of mass customization, has proven to be a high-performance strategy in the discrete industry. In the process industry, however, it remains poorly explored, especially when differentiation relates to product composition rather than form. Reverse Blending is a new OR blending problem based on a quadratic formulation, where output requirements are similar to those of classical blending, but here inputs are not preexisting and must be defined simultaneously with their use in the blending process while exactly meeting output requirements. These may then be used to obtain a wide variety of custom fertilizers (outputs) from a small number of Canonical Basis Inputs that can be blended outside the chemical plant, close to the endusers. This would avoid production of a wide variety of small batches of final products through a small number of large batches of intermediate products, resulting in valuable logistical streamlining and substantial cost savings. Accordingly, our paper investigates the potential benefits of implementing Reverse Blending in the fertilizer industry. Keywords: Reverse Blending
Delayed differentiation Fertilizer industry
1 Introduction Increasing global food production by maximizing crop yields while preserving soil fertility is critical to sustaining food security and keep pace with population growth. To this end, soil nutrient concentration must be optimal to ensure high nutrient use efficiency [1]. This requires using customized fertilizers complying with specifically adapted formulas whose nutrients and proportions differ according to the pedological characteristics and the crops. In addition to the principal nutrients (nitrogen N, phosphorus P, potassium K), such fertilizers can be supplemented by several secondary nutrients (such as sulfur), resulting in hundreds or even thousands of formulas to match the actual needs for these different nutrients. For a fertilizer manufacturer, this means producing a large number of batches of different customized fertilizers on continuous production lines, and a major challenge in managing the production, storage and distribution of a wide variety of continuous flow products. However, such very wide variety, especially in the context of continuous production, should be avoided since © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2020 Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 B. Lalic et al. (Eds.): APMS 2020, IFIP AICT 591, pp. 227–236, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57993-7_26
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production and delivery performance are undermined by a greater product variety that increases direct labour and material costs, manufacturing overheads, delivery lead time and inventory levels [2]. Concerning discrete production, e
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