Efficient Distribution of a Fleet of Heterogeneous Vehicles in Agriculture: A Practical Approach to Multi-path Planning

Determining the best path planning for an agricultural task is a very important issue in crop management because it directly affects the distances travelled by the agricultural machines and, accordingly, directly affects the soil compaction that occurs and the inputs that are consumed (time and fuel). However, determining the optimal path is a difficult problem because of the large number of variables that must be taken into account: number of vehicles, speeds, turning radii, geometry of the field, tank capacities, fuel consumption, etc. The problem becomes even more difficult when the vehicles are heterogeneous, that is, they perform at different speeds or have different rates of fuel consumption. Furthermore, the optimal multi-path plan may vary depending on the criteria selected, that is, the paths that are optimal for reducing distance may be very inefficient for saving time. In this paper, a practical approach to multi-path planning for fleets of heterogeneous and autonomous vehicles is proposed, considering the optimisation of several criteria such as distance, time, input cost or some combination thereof.