Temporal & Spatial Scheduling Model for Agricultural Machinery

Abstract

In China, more and more agricultural machinery service organizations grow up and develop quickly. To meet the scheduling demands to the team leaders in the agricultural machinery organizations, the time-window based temporal & spatial scheduling model for agricultural machinery is built, in order to rational allocate the resources of farmland and machinery, to reduce the time and effort spent, to improve the efficient, and to minimize the entire cost. The model serializes decision-making processes and gets optimal solutions for each process. At each decision stage, considering farmland of m and agricultural machinery of n, filter out the available agricultural machinery and the farmland waiting for operation according to the standards, then construct the cost matrix with the distance and resistance factors, and get the assignment model solution at last. The prototype system with web client and PC client is developed, which realizes functions like monitoring, data input, model calculation, dispatch command generation, center navigation, and so on. Cooperating with two agricultural organizations, the system is tested in practice. In the practical applications, the information of farmland and the time-window constraints is extracted from the task orders, and the inputs of the agricultural machinery positions and the topological road data are generated from the agricultural machinery monitoring data. Thus, the model calculates and generates results, such as the Gantt chart of the agricultural machinery operations, the route for dispatching the agricultural machinery and the evaluation of model results, which are used by monitoring center to assign tasks and. The practical results show that the model can perform well, which improves the work efficiency of the agricultural association, and the model has a good application.