A Model for Scheduling a Fleet of Autonomous Electric Agricultural Robots

Mateus Vilela Souza (1) , Bruno Bachelet (1) , Thiago Noronha (2) , Loïc Yon (1) , Christophe Duhamel (3)

1 LIMOS - Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Modélisation et d'Optimisation des Systèmes
2 UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais = Federal University of Minas Gerais [Belo Horizonte, Brazil]
3 LITIS - Laboratoire d'Informatique, du Traitement de l'Information et des Systèmes

Autonomous and electric robots appeared in agriculture to perform activities on the fields. The management systems dedicated to farms thus need to integrate software for the scheduling of a fleet of such robots. As agricultural systems are by nature subject to unpredictable events, it seems necessary to provide a solution for online scheduling. As a first step toward a global solution, we propose a model for a sub-problem that targets to provide the next route of each robot of the fleet in order to satisfy a subset of the demands for activities on fields emitted by the farmers. In this work, we present a mixed integer linear programming formulation for the sub-problem using the prize-collecting concept called here Prize-Collecting Robot Scheduling Problem with Time Window and Precedence Constraints. Specific constraints are introduced to ensure that PC-RSP provides viable solutions for the targeted online process.

Keywords: Scheduling; Prize-collecting; Agriculture

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Operations Research [cs.RO]

Mateus Vilela Souza, Bruno Bachelet, Thiago Noronha, Loïc Yon, Christophe Duhamel. A Model for Scheduling a Fleet of Autonomous Electric Agricultural Robots. LIV Brazilian Symposium of Operational Research (SBPO), Nov 2022, Juiz de Fora, Brazil. ⟨hal-03984058⟩