Agricultural operations planning in fields with multiple obstacle areas

•Generation of feasible area coverage plan in fields with multiple obstacle areas.•The optimization of the block sequence connection is formulated as a TSP problem.•The developed model requires low computation time to compute the optimal block sequence.•The error between the simulated and actual total traveled distance was 0.15–0.21%.

When planning an agricultural field operation there are certain conditions where human planning can lead to low field efficiency, e.g. in the case of irregular field shapes and the presence of obstacles within the field area. The objective of this paper was to develop a planning method that generates a feasible area coverage plan for agricultural machines executing non-capacitated operations in fields inhabiting multiple obstacle areas. The developed approach consists of three stages. The first two stages regard the generation of the field geometrical representation where the field is split into sub-fields (blocks) and each sub-field is covered by parallel tracks, while the third stage regards the optimization of the block sequence aiming at minimizing the traveled distance to connect the blocks. The optimization problem was formulated as a TSP problem and it was solved implementing the ant colony algorithmic approach. To validate the developed model two application experiments were designed. The results showed that the model could adequately predict the motion pattern of machinery operating in field with multiple obstacles.