Abstract
This paper considers an integrated approach to two common problems in a precision agriculture framework: management zone delineation and selective harvest scheduling. Our model minimizes the total costs of harvest operations, establishing planning and scheduling for selective harvest of each selected management zone. Therefore, this tool provides important information for decision making of farmers in the field. Our integrated model is contrasted with the hierarchical approach commonly used in the literature for these cases, where the result of zoning problem is an input to schedule the harvest problem. Both problems were solved through a complete enumeration of all the potential management zones and demonstrated the advantages of our proposed model over the hierarchical approach. Our model reached an average reduction of 10% in harvest operations costs for different instances in a case study.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier version of this paper. We also appreciate the work performed by research assistant Daniela Navarro. This research was partially supported by DGIIP from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Grant PIM 172). The authors also wish to acknowledge the Ibero-American Program for Science and Technology for Development (CYTED 516RT0513).
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Albornoz, V.M., Araneda, L.C. & Ortega, R. Planning and scheduling of selective harvest with management zones delineation. Ann Oper Res 316, 873–890 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-021-04112-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-021-04112-1