Novel Route Planning System for Machinery Selection. Case: Slurry Application

Abstract

The problem of finding an optimal solution for the slurry application process is casted as a capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) in which by considering the vehicle’s capacity, it is required to visit all the tracks only once to fully cover the field, as well as complying with a specified targeted application rate. A key objective in this study was to determine an optimized coverage plan in order to minimize the driving distance in the field, while at the same time allowing for varying the application rate. The coverage plan includes the optimal sequence of tracks with a specified application rate for each track. Two algorithms were developed for optimization and simulation of the slurry application cast as capacitated operations. In order to validate the proposed algorithms, a slurry application operation was recorded, and the results of the optimization algorithm were compared with the conventional non-optimized method. The comparison showed that applying the proposed new method reduces the non-working distance by 18.6% and the non-working time by 28.1%.

Keywords

• route planning
• precision agriculture
• operational planning
• area coverage planning
• optimization
• operations management