An Interactive Planning Model for the New Zealand Dairy Industry

A long-term planning model for a large New Zealand dairy company is described. The model presents an integrated view of the company's operation, including transportation and processing. The model used is based on a network formulation, NETPLAN, developed by the authors to carry out the optimisation. NETPLAN is highly flexible, interactive and provides graphical output of the results. The optimisation maximises net revenue based on product prices, variable process costs and variable transport costs subject to factory capacity, product demand and raw material supply constraints.