Intelligent Logistics at Harvest Time in Grain Production

This work presents an approach to optimization of the grain transportation at harvest time - an issue, which turns out to be crucial nowadays, even in global aspect. This is of great importance to big grain producers as this saves a large amount of labor force, fuel, maintenance expenses for machines etc. Here an approach is proposed for the optimization of the land transportation of many millions of tons of grain, based on solving network flow problems. The main issue in the paper is the circulation of the haulage vehicles and other machines and the optimization of the routing, i.e. minimization of the transport expenses while observing the other requirements of the process - types and quality of grain from different fields and its transportation to the respective warehouses, location of the different storehouses. A formal network flow model with constraints is presented, in which the optimization is reduced to solving a linear programming problem and the applicability of the model is demonstrated. Some directions are given in the conclusion for future research.