Real-Time Allocation of Half-Carcasses on Rails with Compatibility Constraints in the Beef Processing Industry

This paper presents the development and implementation of a decision support system for the real-time allocation of half-carcasses in maturation chambers in the cold industry. The problem is formalized as an online allocation problem with restrictions on sanitary compatibility, regulatory segregation, and capacity, which must be resolved in seconds.
The proposed approach decomposes the problem into two sub-problems solved sequentially—chamber and rail selection—through constructive heuristics of linear complexity. The rail selection heuristic uses a mixing priority table that hierarchically preserves the highest value-added rails, maximizing the grouping of parts with the same level of premium. A stochastic simulator was developed to evaluate the performance of algorithms under different proportions of premium levels in the herd. The system was implemented in two meatpacking units in Brazil with different business rules.