| Harvesting efficiency could be improved significantly by computing optimal harvesting patterns which minimize turning time. Hence, the execution of harvesting operations, especially in case of cooperating harvesters, needs to be carefully planned. In this paper, the operation planning for a fleet of harvesters is formulated as a discrete optimization, multi-Traveling Salesman Problem (m-TSP). Given number of “cities” and the cost traveling between every pair of them, the m-TSP searches for m round trips (one for every of m salesmen) in a way that every “city” is visited exactly once and the total cost is minimized. In our proposed formulation, the “cities” of the m- TSP correspond to the operating rows of the field. The cost is the nonproductive time,... |
