Harvesting scheduling operations for the machinery owners under multi-farmland, multi-type situation with time window - an empirical study arising in agricultural contexts in China.

Harvesting scheduling operations and allocations are very important for the agricultural machinery owners and the farmers regarding to finish the harvesting work. Most of the machinery owners schedule their farm machinery by experience, which is a big waste of the agriculture resources. This paper is an attempt to schedule the agricultural machinery for the machinery resource centers under multi-farmland, multi-type machinery situation with time window constrain in order to maximize efficiency of resource utilization. A novel modelling method with improved genetic algorithm is presented. An empirical study of an agricultural machinery association in Hebei province in China is illustrated and the results show that the models and the scheduling algorithm proposed in this study can improve agricultural utilization of the farm machinery resource centers and reduce the costs of agricultural machinery usage.