The Optimal Scheduling Model for Agricultural Machinery Resources with Time-Window Constraints

Scheduling harvesting operations is very important for the agricultural machinery centres and the farmers in order to finish the harvesting work effectively.Most machinery owners schedule their farm machinery according to their own experiences, resulting in a big waste of agriculture resources.This paper attempts to schedule the use of agricultural machinery from the machinery resource centres under multi-farmland, multi-type situations considering time, spatial and weather factors as well as road factors in order to maximize efficiency of resource utilization.A modified fuzzy hybrid genetic algorithm is proposed to establish this scheduling model.An empirical study of an agricultural machinery association in Anhui province in China is illustrated and the results show that the models and the scheduling algorithm proposed in this study can improve the efficiency of utilization of the agricultural machinery resource centres and reduce the costs of agricultural machinery usage.