A Novel Approach for the Location and Allocation of Maintenance Service Vehicles in Agriculture

Maintenance service vehicles are deployed by the agricultural machinery manufacturing enterprises to provide maintenance service for agriculture machinery in the busy farming season. This paper focuses on joint optimization of the location and allocation problem of maintenance service vehicles in agriculture and proposed a new solution. In order to determine the location of service stations and the number of maintenance service vehicles in each service station, the set covering model is developed to minimize the total vehicle dispatching cost and penalty cost during the service process, and the improved genetic algorithm is then designed to solve the problem. Finally, a real case in Human province in China is conducted to demonstrate the performance of the developed methodology.