Wheat harvest schedule model for agricultural machinery cooperatives considering fragmental farmlands

For wheat harvesting considering fragmental farmlands, traditional wheat harvest scheduling based on largescale 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.