Development of Computer Program in Designing Transportation Packaging for Agricultural Products

Abstract

The biggest damage of agricultural products after harvesting occurs in the process of transportation or distribution. An effort to minimize the damage is to use appropriate packaging. Computers can be used to assist in the development of package design depending on the requirements of the distribution of agricultural products. Therefore, computer programs called Packaging Design System version 1 (PDS I) and version 2 (PDS II) have been developed to deal with these issues. In the PDS I and II, the packaging was designed only derived from corrugated board material and had not been equipped by proper ventilation design. In fact, the use of wood as packing material for transport is still popular in Indonesia, therefore in PDS II , additional selection of wood materials was developed in designing packaging and complete with ventilation. The result was a software, created by using Visual Basic programming language, called PDS III. Output generated from this program were dimension of packaging and packaging materials (corrugated board / wood). Especially on corrugated packaging, the type and wide of ventilation were informed. The output is generated from data entry such as geometry, dimensions and the individual weight of commodities, weight desired by package, the choice of packaging materials. This program also produced images of formation fruit in the package and formation of package in the container. It is intended to provide comfort in the preparation of fruits and packages.