Scheduling of Collaborative Vegetable Harvesters and Harvest-Aid Vehicles on Farms

Xiao Han, Huarui Wu (), Huaji Zhu, Jingqiu Gu, Wei Guo and Yisheng Miao
Additional contact information
Xiao Han: National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China
Huarui Wu: National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China
Huaji Zhu: National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China
Jingqiu Gu: National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China
Wei Guo: National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China
Yisheng Miao: National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing 100097, China

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: Transporting harvested vegetables in the field or greenhouse is labor-intensive. The utilization of small harvest-aid vehicles can reduce non-productive time for farmers and improve harvest efficiency. This paper models the process of harvesting vegetables in response to non-productive waiting delays caused by the scheduling of harvest-aid vehicles. Taking into consideration harvesting speed, harvest-aid vehicle capacity, and scheduling conflicts, a harvest-aid vehicle scheduling model is constructed to minimize non-production waiting time and coordination costs. Subsequently, to meet the collaborative needs of harvesters, this paper develops a discrete multi-objective Jaya optimization algorithm (DMO-Jaya), which combines an opposition-based learning mechanism and a long-term memory library to obtain scheduling schemes suitable for agricultural environments. Experiments show that the studied model can schedule harvest-aid vehicles without conflicts. Compared to the NSGA-II algorithm and the MMOPSO, the DMO-Jaya algorithm demonstrates a better diversity of solutions, resulting in a shorter non-productive waiting time for harvesters. This research provides a reference model for improving the efficiency of vegetable harvesting and transportation.

Keywords: vegetables in the field/greenhouse; non-productive waiting; collaborative of harvesting and transportation; discrete multi-objective optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/9/1600/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/9/1600/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:14:y:2024:i:9:p:1600-:d:1477786

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().