Wheat harvest schedule model for agricultural machinery cooperatives considering fragmental farmlands

For wheat harvesting considering fragmental farmlands, traditional wheat harvest scheduling based on large-scale arable lands is unfavorable in China. Combine-harvesters, owned by agricultural machinery cooperatives, need new harvesting models for fragmental farmlands. This paper provided an operational model to determine the optimal combine-harvesters’ scheduling for fragmental farmlands. The objective function is to minimize the wheat harvesting period. The minimal difference of harvesting time among combine-harvesters is considered as constraint. A hybrid tabu search approach is proposed to identify the optimal schedule that achieves the objectives of minimizing the harvesting period and minimizing the differences of harvesting time among combine-harvesters. Real data are collected from Huaguang village, Tangji town, Huaiyuan district, Anhui province, China, which is a typical grain producing region. The model results indicate that the wheat harvesting period can be reduced by approximately 10% and that the efficiency and fairness among different harvester owners can be improved if the model and algorithm proposed in this paper are applied.