A model and two heuristic approaches for a forage harvester planning problem: a case study

This work considers a decision problem about orders of owners and routes of smallholdings for a harvester in an agricultural cooperative in which each owner has a proposal about the instant time in which he would like that the machine starts the activity in his land and the different smallholdings of each owner should be processed as a block. A binary linear programming model is introduced in order to reducing costs. Solving the model for actual size instances is computationally burdensome. Hence, we introduce and implement two heuristic algorithms to reduce the computational time. The heuristics are applied to the real case of the cooperative “Os Irmandiños” with a large number of owners and smallholdings. The numerical results show that the heuristics can solve large instances effectively with reasonable computational effort.