Coverage planning for capacitated field operations, Part I: Task decomposition

•Capacitated field operations (high dosage liquid fertilising) recorded with GPS.•Non-productive activities identified and measured.•Area coverage task decomposed into feasible driving actions.•Field efficiency is highly affected by the selection of driving actions.

In certain field operations, such as fertilising, capacity restrictions lead to significant non-productive in-field travelling and out-of-field transport, thereby reducing field efficiency and increasing operating costs. This indicates a potential benefit from improving the efficiency of capacitated operations by minimising the non-productive travelled elements. A prerequisite for the optimisation of a field operation is the identification of the activities which contribute to the reduction of the efficiency and the definition of the actions that take place during the operation. The objective of this paper was to identify the sources of non-productivity in capacitated field operations and decompose the operation to feasible driving actions. Based on the monitoring of operations and subsequent data analysis, the recorded driven paths were decomposed into four types of non-productive activities. The involved driving actions during the fertilising operation were then defined, and finally, the potential of minimising the contribution of each non-productive activity to the operation efficiency by the selection of appropriate driving actions, was quantified. This assessment revealed that the selection of a subsequent action, might on one hand decrease the contribution of a specific non-productive activity to the total non-working travelled distance, but on the other hand might increase this contribution of another activity. There is therefore a trade-off between the positive contribution to the overall efficiency between one activity and the negative contribution from another. This indicates that a targeted algorithmic optimisation method should be devised by searching for the optimal combination among the prescribed driving actions.