PHOTO: BEVAP
PHOTO: BEVAP
PHOTO: BEVAP PHOTO: CNA / WENDERSON
LOGISTICS ▶▶▶
Bevap harvests sugar cane more efficiently with AI and IoT
S BY JOS VAN DE VOOREN
ugar cane production in Brazil amounts to 769 million tonnes per year. A typical factory processes 2 mil- lion tonnes. Companies are challenged
every day to reduce costs, with harvest and transport being responsible for more than 30% of the total. Bevap understood that it could re- duce costs by optimising the harvest. It identi- fied points that could be automated to reach the expected return. To be even more efficient, Bevap brought artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) into the process.
Mobility to the field Bevap, in João Pinheiro, has more than 1,500 employees and processes 15 thousand tonnes of sugar cane per day into sugar and ethanol. The required energy is generated by burning bagasse, the remains of the sugar cane after processing. Bevap took the initial step into the connected and mobile world in 2017 by re- placing the hand written delivery notes with tablets. This brought significant operating gains, but also qualified the activities of em- ployees engaged in farming, trucks and agri- cultural equipment through mobility. “We have achieved much more than expressive opera- tional gains. The project to bring mobility to the field has generated another value to the
Harvesting and transportation accounts for one third of the total production costs of sugar from sugar cane. To be more efficient, Bevap brought artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things into this process. This resulted in 8% increased efficiency representing € 150 million.
business by digitally including professionals who could not imagine using a tablet in their day to day work,” says Fabio André Ramos, information technology manager. Bevaps harvesting process was largely com- posed of manual actions. The aim was to find a solution for: 1. harvest and transshipment; 2. transport and internal logistics; 3. digital certification of cane; 4. telemetry.
Previously, all was carried out manually with the help of radios and supervisors registering the harvest on delivery notes. Even with doing this well, it was not possible to achieve the re- quired efficiency and cost reduction. It was also impossible to make optimum use of the fleet. The harvester often had to idly wait for a transport tractor.
Real-time information The transport tractors were equipped with on-
board computers from Solinftec. Using Inter- net of Things technology (IoT), they commu- nicate with harvesters. These communicate mutually, and by using machine learning they make calculations of travel time, tipping time, routes, and identify which equipment the harvester should call when it finishes loading the transport. In this way, information is ex- changed and data locally processed. The data are then transmitted to the transport truck, which forwards data obtained in the field to the weighing scale at the yard of the sugar mill by means of sensors in the scales. In par- allel, the information is transmitted via the internet to a cloud server. The data is then available to the monitoring centre for all necessary analysis. In the new scenario everything can be moni- tored the moment things happen on the 30 thousand hectares, thus facilitating and streamlining decision making. The on-board computers display the status of the trucks (loaded, empty, waiting for loading, or in the
Artificial intelligence optimises the transport by dispatching sufficient trucks to the point of harvest at any time.
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Using the Internet of Things (IoT) tractors communicate with harvesters. Data ob- tained in the field is transmitted via the in- ternet to a cloud server.
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 24 May 2019
Bevap transforms 3 million tonnes of sugar cane into 213,000 tons of crystal sugar, 180 million litres of ethanol and 2.5 Mwh of elec- tric energy per year.
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