Scheduling for machinery fleets in biomass multiple-field operations

• Scheduling sequential tasks in biomass harvesting operations performed by machinery teams.
• Operational time is more sensitive to changes of machinery team than the operational cost.
• Balancing decisions between the timeliness of the biomass harvesting with the associate costs.

In the light of the current development toward large, and consequently, complicated agricultural production systems, such as systems of biomass production as bioenergy resource, the demand for advanced management tools, such as fleet management tools for scheduling and coordination of multiple vehicles working in multiple-fields, will be increased. In this paper, a planning approach for scheduling sequential tasks involved in biomass harvesting and handling operations performed by machinery teams was presented. The approach determines in which fields each machine has to operate, in what sequence, in which period of time, and the total operational cost of the resulting optimised schedule, taking into account specific factors such as the location and area of fields, available agricultural equipment, and the task times estimation based on the specific machine performance. The cost was included as an additional feature of the individual schedules providing the decision maker the ability to assess the relationship and trade-off between cost and time for each potential derived machinery combination within the available machinery fleet.