Scheduling of Collaborative Vegetable Harvesters and Harvest-Aid Vehicles on Farms

Transporting harvested vegetables in the field or greenhouse is labor-intensive. The utilization of small harvest-aid vehicles can reduce non-productive time for farmers and improve harvest efficiency. This paper models the process of harvesting vegetables in response to non-productive waiting delays caused by the scheduling of harvest-aid vehicles. Taking into consideration harvesting speed, harvest-aid vehicle capacity, and scheduling conflicts, a harvest-aid vehicle scheduling model is constructed to minimize non-production waiting time and coordination costs. Subsequently, to meet the collaborative needs of harvesters, this paper develops a discrete multi-objective Jaya optimization algorithm (DMO-Jaya), which combines an opposition-based learning mechanism and a long-term memory library to obtain scheduling schemes suitable for agricultural environments. Experiments show that the studied model can schedule harvest-aid vehicles without conflicts. Compared to the NSGA-II algorithm and the MMOPSO, the DMO-Jaya algorithm demonstrates a better diversity of solutions, resulting in a shorter non-productive waiting time for harvesters. This research provides a reference model for improving the efficiency of vegetable harvesting and transportation.