Ant Colony Optimization for Scheduling of Agricultural Contracting Work

In small and medium-scale farming it is typically not feasible for farmers to buy expensive equipment to carry out all agricultural tasks themselves. For this reason it is common for farmers with said equipment to work on neighboring farms in addition to their own. In the context of this paper, this is referred to as agricultural contracting. In Finland, where the research for this paper was conducted, a contractor typically receives up to 200 individual orders annually. With orders possibly having varying deadlines, optimal scheduling of work quickly becomes non-trivial. An algorithm for scheduling said tasks is proposed in this paper as well as a model of the contracting process itself.