Multicriteria Optimization of Agricultural Machine Operations

Careful operational planning is essential for making agriculture autonomous and sustainable. The movements of agricultural equipment in the farm can be optimized to increase productivity and reduce costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The aim of this project is to develop and productize advanced optimization algorithms to determine the best end-to-end machine routes, positions of refill trailers and operating schedule during agricultural operations in a growing season. A route is a path from start to end points that one or more machines take while servicing one or more fields in a farm. It can be optimized based on several criteria such as time, distance, GHG emissions, alignment to field boundary and soil erosion. Refill trailers should be strategically placed in the field to reduce idle times of the machines and all machine activities must be coordinated and scheduled to reduce the operation time window.

Faculty Supervisor:

Shahadat Hossain;Saurya Das

Student:

Partner:

Verge Ag

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Agriculture and Food; Clean Technology; Information and Communications Technology

University:

University of Northern British Columbia

Program: