Collaborative maintenance decision-making on task assignments and vehicle route planning in agriculture

Considering the service shortage and service waste for service providers in busy season, this paper focus on the joint optimization problem of task assignment and vehicle route planning for geographically distributed agricultural machinery, which can be called multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP). We propose a collaborative maintenance decision-making model considering several key issues, including the service range of each service station, time window and priority of customers, the skill of service technicians, and maintenance time. We utilize particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to optimize the task assignments and vehicle route planning simultaneously, and inspired by genetic algorithm (GA), we introduce variation mechanism to avoid plunging into local optimum. A large-scale real data study is presented to illustrate the superiority and feasibility of the collaborative service model compared with the traditional independent delivery model.