Redesign of a supply chain: steering a phosphate industry

This paper proposes an approach to redesign a phosphate production mining supply chain to improve customer satisfaction, minimise the number of resources mobilised, and the production costs related to extracting and enriching source ores (SO). Steering a phosphate industry is linked to a set of decisions such as the extraction methods, ore blends, and routings used while considering the impact of those decisions on the behavior of all chemical components characterising products. We develop a mixed-integer linear programming model to minimise a cost function subject to ingredients availability in stocks and their chemical characteristics, customers' expectations, and infrastructure capacity and availability. This model determines the optimal production path followed by each ingredient composing each merchantable ore (MO) including blends to use (quantities and alternative routing) and periods of resources mobilisation. Numerical results illustrate the flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency ensured by the model.