Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220

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Computers and Electronics in Agriculture

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compag

Original papers

Route planning for agricultural tasks: A general approach for fleets of

autonomous vehicles in site-specific herbicide applications
Jesus Conesa-Muoz, Jos Mara Bengochea-Guevara, Dionisio Andujar, Angela Ribeiro
Centre for Automation and Robotics (CSIC-UPM), Ctra. Campo Real Km 0.2, 28500 Arganda del Rey, Madrid, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Route planning in agricultural fields is a major challenge closely related to the amount of inputs con-
Received 18 March 2016 sumed and the associated soil compaction. Current approaches primarily focus on reducing the travelled
Received in revised form 6 June 2016 distances (i.e., the trajectories that vehicles have to cover to carry out the task) and generally do not con-
Accepted 14 June 2016
sider other optimization criteria such as input costs (e.g., fuel, herbicides, labor). Furthermore, although
Available online 22 June 2016
few approaches consider more than one vehicle, none of them takes into consideration vehicles with dif-
ferent characteristics, such as different speeds or different turning radii, and some variabilities of the field
Keywords:
such as the weed distribution have not been studied yet. All these factors affect the cost of routes to be
Route planning in agricultural scenarios
Route planning for autonomous vehicle
followed to accomplish agricultural tasks such as site-specific treatments. In this context, this study pro-
fleets poses a very general approach to optimize the routes that considers: (1) different criteria such as the trav-
Precision agriculture elled distance, the time required to perform the task and the input costs, even simultaneously, (2)
Site-specific applications vehicles with different features (e.g., working speeds, both intra and inter-crop, turning radii, fuel con-
Combinatorial optimization problem sumptions, tank capacities and spraying costs), (3) the variability of the field and (4) the possibility of
Simulated annealing tank refilling.
The proposed approach has special relevance for route planning in site-specific herbicide applications.
This case requires a tank on board the vehicle to store an agrochemical product, and its capacity must be
considered because it affects the routes to be followed, specifically in those cases in which the tank capac-
ity may not be sufficient to treat the entire field even when working in cooperation with other vehicles. In
such cases, refilling (i.e., a round trip to the refilling depot) may be essential despite the extra cost
involved in this operation.
The proposed approach was validated by solving several illustrative problems. The results showed that
the proposed route planner covers a broad range of agricultural situations and that the optimal routes
may vary considerably depending on the features of the fleet vehicles, the variability of the field and
the optimization criteria selected. Finally, a comparative study against other well-known agricultural
planners was carried out, yielding routes that improved those produced by the reference approaches.
2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
The use of sensors, robotized equipment and computational
systems integrated on board agricultural machinery is becoming
more common (Mulla, 2013; Mousazadeh, 2013). One current
research area within this topic concerns the planning of the routes
that vehicles must follow to efficiently complete their tasks. Many
commercial systems can be found on the market to help farmers
address this issue (TopCon products, 2016; Trimble, 2016; John
Deere, 2016). However, they generally focus on guiding/supervis-
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jesus.conesa@csic.es (J. Conesa-Muoz), jose.bengochea@csic.
es (J.M. Bengochea-Guevara), dionisioandujar@hotmail.com (D. Andujar), angela.
ribeiro@csic.es (A. Ribeiro).
ing the driver rather than generating the routes to be followed.
Indeed, most of these systems allow setting the route for a vehicle
either manually or using a predefined pattern line (TopCon System
350, 2016), and allow supervising/controlling the vehicle trajectory
using an integrated auto-steering system to achieve total coverage
of an area while avoiding overlaps. Additionally, these systems are
usually able to supervise whether other aspects of the task are
being performed as expected, e.g. if the flow rate is consistent with
specifications during spraying (TopCon System 350, 2016).
However, they are not capable to automatically generate a route
that considers the field characteristics, the specifications of the
task and the vehicles features but rather delegate this responsibil-
ity to the farmers. In other words, given some initial and final posi-
tions for a tractor with a spray boom, the vehicles corresponding

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2016.06.012
0168-1699/ 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Nomenclature
Symbols
b refill binary vector
cdij , cIij , ctij costs of operation oj for the ith vehicle in terms of dis-
tance, input cost and time, respectively
fd(x), fI(x), ft(x) distance, input cost and time consumed by all
vehicles in the fleet, respectively, for a solution x
gd(xi), gI(xi), gt(xi) distance, input cost and time consumed only by
vehicle vi e V, respectively, to complete its part of the
solution (xi)
mi number of minimum machinery operations of type oi
oi operation of ith type
O set of different machinery operations
Q Q
-turn turn maneuver of type
r permutation of the tracks in the field
si separator element in r that separates the tracks in
charge of the vehicles i and i + 1
S set of separator elements
turning radius (i.e., the radius of the smallest circular turn it can
make) and a distribution map of the weed patches, the currently
available commercial systems are not able to calculate the vehicle
trajectory to minimize distance, time, fuel or maneuvers while pre-
cisely spraying herbicide on the weeds.
Conversely, academic studies that have been published to date
do address the routing problem. The usual approach of these works
consist in dividing the field into smaller pieces (usually tracks) and
then finding the optimal order to connect them (Stoll et al., 2003;
Tax et al., 2006; Oksanen and Visala, 2009), visiting each piece
exactly once and avoiding overlaps and vehicle collisions inside
each track. Thus, the routing problem can be expressed as a com-
binatorial optimization problem in which the optimal order to con-
nect all of the tracks must be found. Most approaches that have
been proposed to solve this problem use the distance as the opti-
mization criterion, and the minimum turning radii of the vehicles
must therefore be considered to achieve realistic results (Bochtis
and Vougioukas, 2008); however, in agricultural tasks, other crite-
ria should be considered, such as the time required to accomplish
the task and the inputs required (e.g., fuel, herbicide). Saving time
directly affects the task cost due to the hourly wage of the workers
in charge of the task (Pedersen et al., 2006), and saving inputs also
reduces the task cost while simultaneously reducing the environ-
mental influence (Berny, 2007). Some of the proposed approaches
consider time as a criterion to be optimized (Srensen and Nielsen,
2005; Bochtis et al., 2010), expressing it as a function of the dis-
tance travelled and the type of turning performed; however, they
do not take into consideration the difference between the working
speed (i.e., the required speed within the crop) and the typical free
speed in the crop headlands.
An interesting approach is the use of several vehicles working
simultaneously to perform a task. This strategy presents several
advantages, such as the reduction of the task time and the soil
compaction when the vehicles are small-medium sized, in addition
to being more fault-tolerant because vehicle failure can be com-
pensated for by other vehicles that can assume the work of the
inoperative unit. The problem becomes harder because not only
the optimal routes must be found, how to distribute the vehicles
to achieve the task cooperatively must be also planned. Accord-
ingly, Edwards et al. (2015) addressed the planning problem for a
fleet of homogeneous vehicles (i.e., vehicles with the same charac-
teristics, such as working speed and turning radius) and obtained
205
ti ith track of the field
T set of tracks
V set of vehicles
x generic solution
x optimum solution
O-turn turn maneuver of type O
Acronyms
CVRP capacited vehicle routing problem
Mix-opt mix-operator. Operator that combines other reference
operators
RHEA robot fleets for highly effective agriculture (European
project)
SA simulated annealing
promising results. However, real situations, such as agrochemical
tanks with different capacities for each vehicle or the different fuel
consumptions of each vehicle, were not addressed in that study.
Concerning the agrochemical tank of a vehicle, it is important to
note that its capacity and the field variability may affect the routes
(Oksanen and Visala, 2009; Jensen et al., 2015). Thus, depending on
the weed distribution and the available agrochemical, the fleet
deployment may vary to avoid refilling operations, for example,
by sending the vehicles with greater amount of agrochemical to
those areas that require larger amounts. Moreover, in these situa-
tions, depot location influences the cost of the routes.
As mentioned, most previous works divide the field into non-
overlapping pieces and try to find the best sequence to cover them
by using graphs where the vertices represent the field pieces and
the costs of the edges are the shortest distances to travel among
them. Then, methods generate the shortest route to visit all the
vertices by using some graph theory search method usually based
on greedy algorithms that do not guarantee to produce optimal
routes in general, although they may yield solutions in a very short
time. Unfortunately these solutions may be very far from the opti-
mal trajectories. In contrast, metaheuristic algorithms can provide
optimal or at least near optimal results if they run long enough.
Metaheuristic approaches have already been used for planning
routes in agricultural fields (Hameed et al., 2011), but considering
only a vehicle and without taking into account the crop variability
and/or charging tasks.
This paper presents a very general approach to agricultural
route planning taking into consideration relevant route planning
aspects such as several vehicles, several optimization criteria, dif-
ferent vehicles characteristics, field variability distributions and
the possibility of refilling. The study was developed in the context
of the European project RHEA (FP7-NMP 245986, RHEA project,
2014). The primary aim of RHEA was the development of a fleet
of autonomous robots with different capabilities that were able
to collaboratively perform site-specific weed treatment. Thus, the
proposed study particularizes the tests and some aspects in site-
specific weed treatments, although the approach is general and
could be applied for other site-specific treatment such as variable
rate applications of nitrogen and phytosanitary products.
The proposed planner expresses the route problem as a combi-
natorial optimization problem and tackles it by a metaheuristic
search such as simulated annealing (Kirkpatrick and Vecchi, 1983).
206 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Finally, in the results section, the proposed approach is com-
pared against the results obtained by the Hameeds (Hameed
et al., 2011) and Bochtis (Bochtis and Vougioukas, 2008)
approaches. Additionally, the results of some illustrative tests per-
formed for a broad range of typical agricultural situations are also
presented.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Problem definition
In a treatment context, an agricultural vehicle carries a tool that
simultaneously covers a set of contiguous crop rows, hereinafter
called track. Considering that the fleet must cover each track
exactly once to avoid redundant treatment and soil compaction,
and the vehicles can only turn on the crop headlands, the agricul-
tural route planning problem to fully cover a field can be separated
into two stages: one to divide the field into parallel tracks using the
crop direction and the working tool length, and the other to obtain
the optimal track sequence that may be interspersed with trips to
the depot, that is, to determine the track sequence that optimizes
some criterion such as the travelled distance, the input consumed
or the time required to perform the task.
Because each track must be covered exactly once, the track
sequences can be represented as permutations of the set T [ S that
contains all of the tracks ti e T of the field and some separator ele-
ments si e S to differentiate the tracks covered by each vehicle of
the fleet. Exactly n  1 extra elements si are contained in S, where
n is the number of vehicles in the fleet. In addition to the track cov-
erage order, consumable refills (i.e., fuel, herbicide, etc.) must also
be considered, because if a vehicle does not have a tank with a suf-
ficient capacity to treat all of its assigned tracks, it will need to tra-
vel to the depot for refilling. In practice, refilling can be performed
only during a transition between tracks, therefore, in addition to
the coverage permutation, it is necessary to include some addi-
tional information in the solution to establish whether a refill is
required during the transition between two tracks. Mathemati-
cally, this problem can be expressed by Eq. (1):
x argminx f x 1 lem a refill mask with as many elements as tracks is used instead of
where f(x) is the objective function that assesses the cost of the
routes associated with a solution x that consists of the pair (r, b).
In this study, r is a permutation of the set T [ S, and b is a binary
vector or mask, b e {0, 1}m, where m is the number of track transi-
tions in r, and x denotes the solution that minimizes the evaluated
criterion. If bi is 0, then no trip to the depot occurs during transition
i; otherwise, a trip must occur. Transition i represents the route
travelled from track tr(i) to track tr(i+1).
2.2. Proposed method
The problem investigated in this study consists of determining
the optimal route to cover all of the tracks required and determin-
ing which transitions require a visit to the depot to refill; thus, the
problem can be expressed in terms of a combinatorial optimization
and can be described as an extension of the well-known CVRP NP-
Hard problem (Gutin and Punnen, 2002), where tracks are visited
instead of customers, treatment is supplied instead of goods, vehi-
cles can have different features and visits to the depot to refill are
allowed. As a consequence, it might be suitable to approach this
problem using probabilistic methods, such as meta-heuristics,
which are widely used to address combinatorial optimizations
(Blum and Roli, 2003). The simulated annealing method (SA)
(Kirkpatrick and Vecchi, 1983) is a commonly used meta-
heuristic algorithm for solving this type of problems, including in
routing applications for robotic platforms (Tavares et al., 2011;
Miao and Tian, 2013). The SA method works by emulating the
physical process whereby a solid is slowly cooled such that when
its structure is eventually frozen, it has a minimum-energy con-
figuration. Extrapolating this behavior to a computational search,
the algorithm generates iteratively new random solutions always
selected if they are superior to the previous explored solutions
and, in otherwise, they are accepted depending on a temperature
parameter which decreases over time. In other words, the higher
temperature, the higher probability of accepting newer worse solu-
tions. Accepting worse solutions allows the algorithm to avoid
local minima and, in this manner, to have a chance of exploring
the entire solution space.
Because better solutions replace previous worse solutions, it is
expected that the algorithm converges to the best solutions. Thus,
after some amount of time, which depends on the size of the search
space, the solutions that are found are typically near the optimum
solution.
Additionally, to avoid stagnation at local minima when the tem-
perature is low, a reannealing behavior can be included in the
method to increase the temperature and, consequently, getting a
more randomly search that mitigates the effects of local minima
(Ingber, 1989).
2.2.1. Solution representation
As explained above, the solution to this problem is composed of
two parts: track permutation and refilling. The permutation is
divided by separator elements si e S into as many parts as there
are vehicles in the fleet. The first part contains the tracks in charge
of the first vehicle, the second part contains the tracks of the sec-
ond vehicle, and so on. The order in which each vehicle covers its
tracks is defined by the order in which the tracks appear in the per-
mutation from the left to the right.
Refilling can be implemented, as explained above, by a binary
vector or a refill mask with as many elements as there are track
transitions in the permutation to indicate whether a vehicle must
refill or not. However, because the number of transitions varies
with the number of vehicles used, the length of this string may
change depending on the routes represented. To address this prob-
carrying a mask with as many elements as transitions. Then, the
meaning of each element bi (see Section 2.1) must be redefined
as follows: a value of 1 indicates that a vehicle must go to the depot
just after leaving track ti and before going to the next track, and a
value of 0 indicates that a vehicle must go directly to the next track
after leaving track ti. Additionally, bi for the last track of a route
does not represent any transition and is thus not considered. With
this representation strategy, the length of the string is constant and
thus easily integrated within any optimization method.
Fig. 1 shows an example of routes that have been codified,
where the field is composed of 10 tracks (||T|| = 10) and the fleet
contains 4 vehicles (||S|| = 3), although vehicle 2 does not appear
in the solution (i.e., it is not in charge of any track). The starting
positions of the vehicles are known in advance and the type of turn
to travel from one track to the next is defined by the minimum
turning radius of the vehicle and the distance between the middle
points of the tracks (i.e., the same distance as the track width)
based on a study by Bochtis and Vougioukas (2008). The refill vec-
tor indicates that depot visits must occur after the third and sixth
tracks (note that the third and sixth vector b components are set to
1); however, refilling must not be considered after the sixth track
because it is the last track covered by vehicle 3.
The minimum turning radius and track width used in Fig. 1 are
3 and 4 m, respectively. Note that the tracks are composed of 4
streets that are 1-m wide; thus, the vehicles cover 4 streets each
time they move down a track.
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220 207

where fd(x), fI(x) and ft(x) denote the distance, the input cost and the
time consumed by all vehicles in the fleet, respectively, for a solu-
tion x; and gd(xi), gI(xi) and gt(xi) are the distance, the input cost
and the time consumed only by vehicle vi e V, respectively, to com-
plete its part of the solution (xi).
To evaluate gd(xi), gI(xi) and gt(xi), the minimum machinery
operations required to accomplish solution xi are calculated.
Because each of these operations has a known associated cost in
terms of any of the objectives considered, it is possible to calculate
the objective values using Eqs. (5)(7):

X
kOk
g d xi mj  cdij 5
j1

Fig. 1. Routes associated with the permutation r = (3, 7, 9, 10, |, |, 8, 4, 6, |, 5, 1, 2) X

kOk

and the refill mask b = (0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0). g I xi mj  cIij 6

j1

For clarity, the field shown in Fig. 1 is a regular field (i.e., all of X
kOk

the tracks start at the same y-coordinate and have the same length) g t xi mj  ctij 7
j1
with a constant crop direction; however, the approach and solution
representation are also valid for non-regular fields even with vari- where mj is the number of minimum machinery operations of type
able crop directions and composed of several parcels, such as those
oj e O required by solution xi. Additionally, cdij , cIij and ctij denote the
in Fig. 2 because the problem, which is implicit in both situations,
costs of operation oj for the ith vehicle in terms of distance, input
can be generalized to determine the optimal order to cover the
cost and time, respectively. Using this approach, it is easy to update
tracks with interspersed refills regardless of the track outline. In
the system by considering new objectives because only the costs of
non-rectangular fields (Fig. 2a), the area must be split into variable
the operations for the new objective must be included since most
lengths and curved tracks (Fig. 2b), and the length of the transi-
objective functions fit either Eq. (3) (i.e., summation) or Eq. (4)
tions between two tracks or between a track and the depot must
(i.e., maximum).
be calculated using more general Dubins curves (Shkel and
The minimum machinery operations oj e O considered in this
Lumelsky, 2001) rather than the equations proposed by other
study include vehicle start-up operations, inter-track movements,
approaches more appropriate to regular fields (Bochtis and
intra-track movements, task operations and refills. Thus, each time
Vougioukas, 2008).
a new vehicle is used in the solution, a vehicle start-up operation is
registered, therefore the number of start-up operations is equal to
2.2.2. Objective functions
the number of vehicles used in the solution. The inter-track and
Objective functions are used to evaluate how well a solution per-
intra-track movements are operations that involve, by definition,
forms in terms of some specific criterion (i.e., an objective) and yield
a 1-m movement on the crop headlands and inside a track, respec-
a value, which is typically known as the objective value or cost that
tively, and thus coincide with the distances (in meters) travelled on
measures the aptness of a solution. The objectives or criteria consid-
the headlands and inside the crop. Movements in the headlands
ered in this study are the distance travelled, the input cost (i.e., the
and inside the crop are separately considered because they are
money spent on herbicide and fuel) and the spent time (i.e., the time
usually performed at different speeds. The number of task opera-
that it takes the fleet to complete the given agricultural task). The
tions equals the number of times that a working tool is used; for
first two objectives are calculated as the sum of the travelled dis-
example, in a selective spraying task, it is the number of times that
tances and the sum of the input costs incurred by each vehicle
the spraying boom is activated, which is related to the amount of
(Eqs. (2) and (3), respectively). Conversely, the task time is defined
agrochemical spent. Finally, a refill consists of waiting for some
as the maximum task time spent by each vehicle (Eq. (4)) because
time duration at a depot while the vehicles tank is refilled with
the vehicles can work in parallel:
herbicide, fuel or any input required to accomplish the agricultural
X
kVk task.
f d x g d xi 2 To calculate the costs of the minimum machinery operations,
i1
the amount of resources spent must be considered. For example,
X
kVk
Table 1 shows the type of resources related to a spraying treatment
f I x g I xi 3
operation. Once the number of operations to be executed and their
i1
cost is known, the exact costs of using the fleet can be calculated.
f t x max g t xi 4
16i6kVk Finally, in certain cases, several criteria should be minimized
simultaneously. To address several objectives using the SA method,

Fig. 2. (a) Non-rectangular fields and (b) definition of tracks in them.

208 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Table 1
Resources that must be considered in a spraying treatment operation.
Operation Distance Fuel Herbicide Input
costa
Start-up U U
Inter-track movement U U U U
(1 m)
Intra-track movement U U U U
(1 m)
Spraying (1 dose) U U
Refill U U
a at any random position before a tank becomes empty. Repairing
Input cost is the combination of the amounts of both fuel and herbicide
consumed.
a linear combination has been proposed (Eq. (8)), where wI and wt
are weights assigned to the input cost and the task time, respec-
tively. This strategy requires that the spent time be expressed in
monetary terms:
f x wI  f I x wt  f t x
With this formulation, collisions among vehicles are avoided
inside of the tracks because each track is visited by only one of
the vehicles; however, collisions may occur on the crop headlands
because these areas are shared by all vehicles. A first approach
could lead to considering such situations in the objective functions
and penalizing solutions that contain collisions, but this would sig-
nificantly increase the computation time of the functions because
the position of each vehicle would need to be checked and com-
pared to the locations of the other vehicles in each instant. Addi-
tionally, there is no guarantee that collisions actually occur at the
instants predicted by the solutions because, as shown experimen-
tally, the rough conditions of the terrain hinder the accurate main-
tenance of the theoretical working speeds; thus, it is likely that the
vehicles will not be in the expected locations at the expected time.
These small deviations in the reference speed, which do not
involve a lack of precision in the execution of the tasks, can cause
collisions in the shared areas. Thus, another more realistic and reli-
able approach must be used; more specifically, vehicles in the fleet
should be equipped with mechanisms to detect and avoid obsta-
cles, for example, using an overall supervision system that con-
stantly monitors their trajectories, avoiding potential collisions
by pausing and resuming the vehicles involved (Conesa-Muoz
et al., 2015).
2.2.3. Generating new solutions
To generate the tracks for new solutions, the SA algorithm uses
the mix-opt operator (Conesa-Muoz et al., 2016). This operator
exploits some common operators used in combinatorial routing
problems, such as relocate (Affenzeller et al., 2009), or-opt (Or,
1976), swap (Oliver et al., 1987), 2-opt (Lin, 1965), cut inversion
(Larraaga et al., 1999) and LSM (Or, 1976). The operator combines
them and then is able to effectively swap, relocate and invert some
elements of the original permutation to generate a new track
sequence. Conversely, to determine the refilling portion of a new
solution, two approaches are tested. The first consists of selecting
a random element of the binary vector and inverting the associated
value so that a refill is added if the selected element contains a 0 or
removed if it contains a 1; this is called the direct inversion option.
The second approach, named random operation, consists of ran-
domly selecting one of the following alternatives: (a) adding a new
refill; (b) removing an existing refill; or (c) changing the refill.
When a new refill is selected, a position of 0 is changed to a posi-
tion of 1; when removing an existing refill is selected, a position of
1 is changed to a position of 0. The change-refill option swaps a
value of 0 into a value of 1.
Time Both approaches were tested several times, selecting the option
that showed the best results on average for configuring the SA
U method, as explained in the results section.
Regardless of the approach selected for modifying the refill
mask, the new solution may not be valid due to the tank capacity
of a vehicle (i.e., one or more of the vehicles will not have sufficient
resources to complete its route given the new refill mask). In this
U case, the solution may be repaired by including additional refills
solutions requires additional computation time but guarantees
building feasible solutions; thus, this method may be profitable
in practice. Additionally, the SA method is usually initialized with
a random solution that may also not be feasible; in this case, it is
always repaired, guaranteeing that the optimization algorithm
works with a feasible solution.
3. Results and discussion
8
The SA algorithm was implemented in Matlab, taking advantage
of the optimization toolbox provided by this platform, and the
experiments were conducted on an Intel Core i5-2500 CPU @
3.30 GHz with 4 GB RAM.
3.1. SA configuration
To achieve the best SA performance some configuration vari-
ables must be set properly. These variables are the initial temper-
ature and the time to reanneal.
As explained in Section 2.2, the temperature T is a global, time-
varying parameter that controls the evolution of the exploration of
the search space; it decreases with time and affects the probability
of accepting inferior solutions. This probability is equal to the for-
 
mula exp  dE T
, where x0 is the new solution, x is the current solu-
tion, and dE = f(x0 )  f(x) is the difference between the objective
values of the solutions obtained by the functions explained in Sec-
tion 2.2. If x0 is worse solution than x, dE is always positive (if the
optimization is a minimization) and the probability tends to
approach 0 as the difference increases.
The SA method was set to manage relatively large changes with
a probability of 0.5 when the temperature is at its peak (i.e.,
T  log0:5
dE
for a large difference dE) to skip strong local minima.
The size of a change depends on the units of the problem; thus,
an estimation of the optimum value was used as a reference to
determine the scale of the changes. Any change greater than twice
the estimation was considered to be large. Thus, the initial temper-
estimation x
ature is defined as T  2 log0:5
for any problem.
The time to reanneal is the time that the algorithm may perform
without obtaining a better solution until the temperature is
increased to restart the search at another point in the space. A
low value might lead to an excessively random search (i.e., an
insufficient amount of time would be allowed to appropriately
explore each part of the space), whereas a high value would lead
to slow convergence. The time to reanneal also depends on the size
of the problem: a longer time duration typically yields a larger
region of the space that must be explored before reannealing
occurs. Thus, the time to reanneal was set to be a quarter of the
number of tracks in the problem in units of seconds.
Some configurations were tested before using the proposed
method to identify which options accelerate the convergence as
much as possible. The options tested were the repair solution pos-
sibility and the refill modification type. The repair solution could
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Fig. 3. Average results for each tested option of the SA algorithm.
be activated or deactivated, and the refill modification types stud-
ied were the direct inversion and random operation, both already
described in Section 2.2.3. Fig. 3 shows the results obtained by test-
ing four possible combinations 10 times for 1 min for a typical dis-
tance optimization problem. The optimum value was estimated to
be approximately 150 m. The best combination found was the one
associated to the options no repair and random operation as the
refill modification type; thus, those options were selected as the
standard configuration and used to test the approach in the next
sections.
3.2. Illustrative problems
To corroborate the versatility and good performance of the pro-
posed approach, the SA method was tested by simulating some
agricultural scenarios which represent different route planning
problems. The idea was to test the method for different fleet con-
figurations (different number of vehicles, different turning radii,
tank capacities, etc.) and different optimization criteria, and to ver-
ify whether the routes obtained were consistent with those
expected. For most of the tests the vehicles had to perform a
site-specific herbicide spraying to treat the weeds in the field.
The weed distribution was known in advance and stored into a
map in matrix form. Each matrix cell corresponded to a treatment
unit of the field and its infestation state. The vehicles had to cover
the field using one dose of herbicide in the cells labeled as infested.
All of the fields used in the tests had 30 tracks and were rectangu-
lar; all of the tracks had the same length. The tracks contained 4
streets that were 0.75-m wide (typical inter-row distance in maize
fields); thus, the vehicles bars were assumed to be 3 m and to con-
tain 4 independent valves (one per street) in such a way that it is
possible to open/close them selectively to spray only desired areas.
All of the tests were run for no more than 1 min and the starting
point of each vehicle was at the beginning of the first track on
the upper crop headland (i.e., top left corner) or the depot, which
was located at point (15, 26).
Table 2
Assumed costs for test 1.
Costs of elementary operations
Startup Inter-track movement Intra-track Spraying (1
(1) (1 m) movement (1 m) cell/dose)
0 1 0 0
209
3.2.1. Test 1. Minimizing the distance travelled in the crop headlands
using different turning radii
The first test consisted of minimizing the distance travelled in
the crop headlands (i.e., only the distance travelled in transitions).
The distance objective function (Eq. (2)) was used in conjunction
with the costs shown in Table 2 to measure the distances travelled
in the crop headlands to perform the operations. Vehicle startup
and spraying do not require moving the vehicle; thus, their costs
were adjusted to 0. Inter-track and intra-track movement opera-
tions, by definition, involve traveling 1 m. However, because we
wanted to minimize only the distance travelled in the crop head-
lands, the intra-track cost was set to 0. In this first test, the same
vehicle with different turning radii (e.g., 1, 3 and 4 m) was used
to completely cover the field without performing any treatment
operation. Fig. 4 shows the different routes obtained as a function
of the turning radii considered.
As shown in Fig. 4, a larger turning radius implies longer turns
and thus longer trajectories because the vehicle must skip more
tracks to avoid O turns (i.e., turns that look like a bulb) longer than
Q
turns (i.e., turns that look like a semicircle) (Bochtis and
Vougioukas, 2008). For the 1-m turning radius the shortest turn
allows moving from a track to the contiguous one, thus the trajec-
tory covers the tracks sequentially. The shortest turn with a 3-m
radius skips one track, thus all of the maneuvers except one skip
one track. Finally the shortest turn with a 4-m radius implies skip-
ping two tracks. In this case the trajectory always skips these two
tracks but one.
Table 3 shows the distances and the solutions obtained. In this
case the solutions are composed of only the permutations, in other
words there is no refill mask in the solution because no tank was
used.
3.2.2. Test 2. Minimizing input cost or/and required time for a fleet of
homogeneous vehicles
This test shows how the proposed approach can address several
similar vehicles with several criteria and how the optimum solu-
tions may significantly differ based on the criterion used in each
case. A fleet of 5 vehicles was used to fully cover a field while
simultaneously spraying herbicide on weeds. The approach was
tested by determining the routes that minimized the following cri-
teria: (a) the input costs, in particular those related to the use of
herbicide and fuel (Eq. (3)); (b) the time required to accomplish
the agricultural task (Eq. (4)); and (c) both criteria concurrently
(Eq. (8)). Table 4 shows the features of the vehicles, assuming an
average consumption of fuel and herbicide of a typical agricultural
vehicle. Similarly, the time to complete the agricultural task was
calculated by assuming an adequate speed during spray
210 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220

Fig. 4. Routes obtained for test 1 with a turning radius of (a) 1 m, (b) 3 m and (c) 4 m.

Table 3
Distances travelled using different turning radii.

Radius (m) Distance travelled in crop headlands (m) Solution (i.e., track order)
1 120.11 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30)
3 281.99 (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 28, 26, 24, 22, 20, 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2)
4 412.51 (1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28, 30, 27, 24, 21, 18, 15, 12, 9, 3, 6, 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29)

treatments. Additionally, assuming that field was divided into cide required and its cost can be easily calculated as a proportional
2400 cells of 0.75 cm  0.75 cm according to the weed map and estimation based on the cost of treating an entire field
that each spraying operation treats one cell, the amount of herbi- (Conesa-Muoz and Ribeiro, 2012). The refill cost is based on the
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220 211

Table 4
Features of the vehicles used for test 2.

Operation costs Turning radius (m) Tank capacity (cells/doses)

Startup (1) Inter-track Intra-track Spraying Refill
movement movement (1 cell/dose)
(1 m, 10 km/h) (1 m, 6 km/h)
t (s) (103) t (s) (103) t (s) (102) t (s) t (s)
0.2 0 0.96 0.36 0.96 0.6 0.51 0 0.0 120 3 720

Fig. 5. Routes obtained to minimize the following criteria: (a) input cost; (b) required time; and (c) both criteria simultaneously.
212 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
time required to fill the vehicles tank. Fig. 5 shows the different
routes obtained based on the minimization criterion. Weed
patches are shown in green and covered a total of 720 cells (i.e.,
30% of the field); thus, a total of 720 doses were required to treat
the entire field.
When the goal is to minimize the input cost (Fig. 5a), a vehicle
is used only if it can cover the field without stopping to refill (i.e.,
it must be equipped with a tank with a capacity of at least 720
doses of treatment) because the launching of a new vehicle rep-
resents an additional cost. Additionally, all possible solutions
involve the same amount of herbicide and are independent of
the vehicle considered because the same spraying cost has been
assumed for all vehicles, and the routes must ensure the coverage
of all of the tracks exactly once. Therefore, the problem is reduced
to determining the routes that minimize the fuel consumption,
which is similar to that proposed in the previous section. How-
ever, the solution shown in Fig. 4b differs from the solution
shown in Fig. 5a, although the fields have the same size and dis-
tribution, and the vehicle has the same turning radius (3 m); this
difference occurs because the initial positions of the vehicles are
different in the two cases. The distance travelled in the solution
shown in Fig. 5a would be 296.096 m, whereas if the tracks order
of the solution represented in Fig. 4b had been used but starting
from the new initial position, the distance travelled would have
been 300.272 m.
Many attempts were made, and the results obtained were
always identical but showed a different vehicle of the fleet each
time because all of the vehicles have the same features; thus, the
cost is not affected by the choice of vehicle.
When the goal is to minimize the time required to perform the
task, the optimal solution involves all of the vehicles (Fig. 5b) to
parallelize the task execution as much as possible.
Finally, when the goal is to simultaneously minimize the input
costs and time the solution lies somewhere between the two pre-
vious solutions (Fig. 5c). For example, the optimal solution in this
case uses 3 vehicles because the required time converted into
Euros (see Eq. (8)) can significantly increase the cost, whereas
using two extra units decreases the time by at least 66.67%.
Weights wI and wt in Eq. (8) have been considered to be equal to
1 and 27/3600, respectively. To estimate the value of coefficient
wt, the typical hourly wage of an agricultural worker, who is in this
case in charge of controlling the fleet, is estimated as 27 /h
(Pedersen et al., 2006).
Tables 5 and 6 show the routes and costs obtained by the solu-
tions shown in Fig. 5. Note that each of the three solutions is the
best result for each of the optimization criteria. The costs are low
because the field evaluated is small (i.e., 1350 m2); a larger field
would increase the costs. For example, if the results of this study
were extrapolated to a typical commercial field of approximately
20 ha, the costs when optimizing the input costs, the required
time and both criteria concurrently would be approximately
607 , 2 h and 17 min and 669 , respectively, and for larger fields
of approximately 100 ha, 3100 , 11 h and 40 min and 3415 ,
respectively.
Table 5
Plans identified by the proposed approach for test 2. The solutions show only the track order and the distribution among vehicles because no refilling occurs in all three cases.
Solution optimized for Solution (i.e., track order)
Input-cost criterion (6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 29, 27, 25, 23, 21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 4, 2, |, |, |, |)
Task-time criterion (5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17|20, 22, 26, 28, 30|16, 18, 23, 25, 27, 29|10, 12, 14, 19, 21, 24|8, 6, 3, 1, 4, 2)
Both criteria (5, 3, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 7, 9, |, |, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29|12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30|)
Table 6
Costs obtained by the proposed approach for test 2. The asterisk denotes the optimal
cost for each criterion.
Solutions optimized for Input cost () Required time (s) Both ()
Input-cost criterion 4.59 376.59 7.41
Task-time criterion 5.48 87.38 6.14
Both criteria 5.01 129.11 5.98
3.2.3. Test 3. Minimizing input cost, required time and both criteria for
a fleet of homogeneous vehicles with small tanks
In the previous test the vehicles had a tank capacity that was
sufficiently large to treat the entire field without needing to refill.
When the tanks have an insufficient capacity to cover the entire
field, solutions are expected to involve refills or more than one
vehicle. The current test was designed to study how the tank
capacity of the vehicles used can affect the routes obtained by
the proposed approach. Consequently, the tank capacities were
set to store only 144 doses (i.e., one-fifth of what the crop field
required). The remaining variables were set to the same values
as those used in the previous test.
Fig. 6a shows the best route found when the goal is to minimize
the input cost. It is shown that refill operations appeared after
tracks 1, 2, 7, 15 and 17. There could have been one fewer refill
expected because the initial tank plus 4 refills are sufficient to
cover the entire field; however, because some round trips to the
depot would have been from/to very distant tracks, which would
require larger distances and higher fuel costs, another refill is more
profitable because significantly reduces the round trip distances, as
shown in Fig. 6a. A solution involving more vehicles could also be a
good option to avoid refills, but this type of solution has a higher
cost because 0.2 is assumed to start a vehicle, and 0.0 is the cost
to fill a tank.
The distribution of the tracks is not similar to that obtained in
test 2 (Fig. 5b) because the distribution of the doses must be exact
(i.e., 144) and equal to the maximum tank capacity, which was not
the case in test 2.
Finally, when the goal is to concurrently minimize both criteria,
the routes generated (Fig. 6c) uses all of the vehicles to avoid refill
operations, even if there are startup operations with a cost of 0.2
each. The time penalty for refilling (120 s) is quite high when con-
 
verted to Euros (0.9 ), as described by Eq. (8) 120  360027
0:9 .
This is the same solution that was obtained when the goal was
to minimize the required time except for the vehicles that are
changed for new vehicles because they are homogeneous. This is
due to the fact that the time has a very strong impact on the both
criterion.
Regarding the previous tests, many attempts were made and
the results obtained were always identical but involved different
vehicles of the fleet because each vehicle has the same features;
thus, the cost is not affected by the choice of vehicle.
Tables 7 and 8 show the routes and costs obtained in the solu-
tions found. Note that the costs are higher than those shown in
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220 213

Fig. 6. Routes obtained for test 3 to minimize the (a) input cost, (b) task time and (c) both criteria simultaneously.

Table 7
Plans (track order and refill vector) identified by the proposed approach for test 3.

Solution optimized for Solution (i.e., track order and refill vector)
Input-cost criterion (18, 20, 22, 17, 12, 16, 21, 15, 4, 6, 3, 1, 9, 11, 13, 10, 8, 7, 5, 2, 14, 19, 23, 25, 30, 28, 26, 29, 27, 24|, |, |, |, )
(1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
Task-time criterion (10, 12, 17, 21, 29|8, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 20|15, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30|1, 2, 4, 6, 13, 19|3, 5, 18, 23, 25, 27)
(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
Both criteria (1, 2, 4, 6, 13, 19|15, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30|8, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 20|3, 5, 18, 23, 25, 27|10, 12, 17, 21, 29)
(0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
214 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Table 8
Costs obtained by the proposed approach for test 3. The asterisk denotes the optimal
cost for each criterion.
Solutions optimized for Input cost () Required time (s) Both ()
Input-cost criterion 4.84 1191.65 13.78
Task-time criterion 5.56 94.63 6.27
Both criteria 5.56 94.63 6.27
Table 6; this is due to the refill operations and the additional dis-
tances travelled to/from the depot.
An extra test was performed with the homogeneous fleet to
determine whether a high refill cost could compensate for the star-
tup cost, making it more profitable to use more vehicles in test 3a.
Thus, the refill cost was changed to 0.2 , which is the same cost as
the startup operation. The solution obtained involved more than
one vehicle (Fig. 7) with a total cost of 5.73 , whereas the solution
that involves only one vehicle would have a cost of 6.04 . The
track order in this case is (3, 5, 2, 6, 4, 1|13, 15, 22, 26, 24|
10, 12, 21, 27, 29, 30|7, 9, 14, 16, 18|8, 11, 19, 17, 20, 23, 25, 28). A
refill still appears, but it is in a transition near the depot and allows
the rest of the fleet to have more comfortable dose margins and
shorter transitions, reducing the overall cost.
Finally, all of the vehicles used in this test could be changed for
any other in the fleet because they all have the same characteris-
tics. Several tests were performed that validated this point.
3.2.4. Test 4. Minimizing input cost, required time and both criteria for
a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles (i.e., different working speeds)
The current test is similar to test 2 but considers the case where
vehicles in the fleet have different features, i.e., different working
speeds. The test must be understood as a theoretical situation,
because vehicles working speeds are usually determined by the
treatment. The test is supposed to be an advanced scenario with
old and modern vehicles that perform at different speeds. The
operation costs are the same as those considered in test 2 except
for the cost of moving operations, as shown in Table 9. Fig. 8 shows
the routes obtained for each considered criterion.
The routes that minimize the input cost (Fig. 8a) are, as
expected, those which minimize the travelled distances (Fig. 5a),
but in this case the solution involves the use of vehicle 2.
When the goal is to obtain the routes that minimize the time
required to perform the task, all of the vehicles are used, as in pre-
vious tests, but the vehicles do not treat the same number of tracks
Fig. 7. Routes obtained for test 3a with a higher refill cost (0.2 ).
Table 9
Assumed costs in time during move operations in test 4 for each vehicle.
Vehicle Speed Inter-track movement Intra-track movement
(km/h) (1 m) (1 m)
1 12 0.30 s 0.30 s
2 10 0.36 s 0.36 s
3 8 0.45 s 0.45 s
4 6 0.60 s 0.60 s
5 4 0.90 s 0.90 s
but rather treat 9, 7, 6, 5 and 3 tracks, respectively, in such a way
that the faster vehicles cover more tracks (Fig. 8b).
Finally, when both criteria are considered simultaneously, as in
the previous cases, the solution involves most of the vehicles but
not all of them because time has a strong influence on the total
cost. The two slowest vehicles were not used. Tables 10 and 11
show the routes and costs of each solution.
3.2.5. Test 5. Minimizing time for a fleet of homogeneous fleet in a field
divided into three parcels
This test was designed to show how the proposed approach
addresses fields divided into different parcels. Tracks in this case
are not always contiguous. A fleet of 3 homogeneous vehicles
was used in this trail. Their starting point was the depot and the
optimization criterion was the time. The three parcels were
designed to have the same size and the depot was taken equidis-
tant from them all, in such way that each vehicle covered one par-
cel (see Fig. 9). The vehicles had a turning radius small enough
(1.5 m) to allow them directly move from a track to the contiguous
one, otherwise, the turning maneuvers could have unbalanced the
routes length, and the distribution would have not been so precise
and clear to study the approach behavior.
3.3. Comparison with other route planning approaches
The proposed approach was compared against another well-
known approaches, (Bochtis and Vougioukas, 2008; Hameed
et al., 2011), that provided enough data in their studies (field con-
tour coordinates and/or input/output track points) to reproduce
the planning scenarios. Both reference planners were only able to
optimize for 1 vehicle and without considering variability, refilling
and tanks, so our proposed planner was particularized to perform
in this conditions too.
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220 215

Fig. 8. Routes obtained for test 4 to minimize (a) input cost, (b) task time and (c) both criteria simultaneously.

Table 10
Plans identified by the proposed approach for test 4. The solutions show only the track order and the distribution among vehicles because no refill occurs in all three cases.

Solution optimized for Solution (i.e., track order)

Input-cost criterion (0, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 29, 27, 25, 23, 21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 4, 2|, |, |)
Task-time criterion (13, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30|17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29|2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 15|6, 8, 10, 12, 14|5, 3, 1)
Both criteria (8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30|11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29|6, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 4, 2, |, |)
216 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Table 11
Costs obtained by the proposed approach for test 4. The asterisk denotes the optimal
cost for each criterion.
Solutions optimized for Input cost () Required time (s) Both ()
Input-cost criterion 4.59 268.59 6.60
Task-time criterion 5.44 74.30 6.00
Both criteria 5.00 92.10 5.69
The Bochtis approach was tested in 4 fields. The first had 8
tracks with a width of 2.89 m and a length of 30 m. In this case a
tractor with a turning radius of 3.5 m was employed. The solution
obtained by Bochtis (Fig. 10a) was r = (1, 4, 7, 3, 6, 8, 5, 2) with a
total distance travelled of 335.767 m and a distance travelled on
headlands of 95.767 m, whereas the solution obtained by the pro-
posed approach in this study (Fig. 10b) was r = (1, 4, 7, 3, 6, 2, 5, 8)
with a total distance travelled of 334.439 m and a distance trav-
elled on headland of 94.439 m. Note that the improvement is due
to the smaller distance travelled in the headlands, since the dis-
tance travelled inside of the tracks cannot be reduced.
The other three fields considered in Bochtis study were part of
a larger route planning project, where the best sequence of tracks
to cover each of the three fields is determined; however, unfortu-
nately, the travelled distances and the shortest routes to connect
the fields are not provided. Therefore, it is not possible to replicate
the same experiment. Nevertheless, the routes for each field are
provided, and thus, each field can be considered individually for
comparison purposes. It is important to highlight that the individ-
ual planning for each field does not guarantee the optimization of
the overall distance because the input and output tracks obtained
when route planning in isolation may not be the optimal routes to
connect the three fields. To overcome this issue, the input and out-
put tracks obtained in Bochtis study were considered as fixed
points; thus, the proposed approach was used to optimize the
order of the internal tracks of each small field. The first field had
20 tracks that were 80-m long; the second field had 12 tracks that
Fig. 9. Routes obtained for test 5 with a fleet of 3 vehicles and a field of 3 parcels.
were 40-m long; and the third field had 12 tracks that were 70-m
long. The input tracks included the 20th, 1st and 2nd tracks,
respectively, and the output tracks included the 18th, 12th and
1st tracks, respectively. The track width for the three fields was
3 m and the turning radius of the vehicle was 2.5 m.
Table 12 summarizes the results obtained by Bochtis and
Vougioukas (2008) and the proposed approach. All of the solutions
(see Table 13) found by the proposed approach outperformed the
Bochtis routes by up to 17% (distances travelled on headlands).
Fig. 11 shows the routes identified by each approach for each small
field.
The proposed approach was also compared against the
approach presented in Hameed et al. (2011), which also uses a
metaheuristic method. In this work, the authors propose a genetic
algorithm to (1) determine the best crop direction to establish the
field, and (2) obtain the shortest track sequence for a single vehicle.
Since the crop direction is an input parameter in the current work,
the comparison was only related to the track sequence optimiza-
tion stage. One of the tests considered in Hameeds study showed
enough information about the vehicle and the field to replicate the
experiment conditions. For this test, the field was composed of 37
tracks with a width of 9 m and had an irregular shape; additionally
the vehicle had a turning radius of 6 m. Furthermore, the input and
output points of the tracks were not provided by the paper and in
consequence were extracted carefully from the actual field location
by using Google Maps. Despite this manual process, the total tracks
length provided by Hameed (6684 m) was nearly the same of the
extracted field (6700.13 m) and both shapes matched very
precisely.
The solution obtained by Hameed (Fig. 12a) was r =
(12, 8, 6, 9, 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 7, 11, 10, 18, 23, 20, . . .
19, 17, 21, 24, 22, 16, 13, 14, 15, 25, 31, 29, 32, 30, 27, 28, 26, 36, 3-
4, 33, 35, 37) with a total distance travelled of 7918.13 m and a dis-
tance travelled on headlands of 1218.00 m, whereas the solution
obtained by the proposed approach (Fig. 12b) was r =
(29, 27, 25, 23, 21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 1-
4, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, . . . 31, 33, 32, 34, 35, 37, 36) with a
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220 217

Fig. 10. Solution obtained for the first field proposed in the Bochtis work: (a) Bochtis route and (b) the proposed approach route.

total distance travelled of 7661.60 m and a distance travelled on crop, and considering the working tools width, route planning was
headlands of 961.47 m, outperforming the Hameeds approach by expressed mathematically as a combinatorial optimization prob-
up to 21%. Moreover, Hameeds work indicates that the same field lem where the optimal order to cover the tracks of the field and
was route planned using the Bochtis approach and the distance the optimal transitions for refilling are identified.
travelled on headlands was 1017 m, therefore, the proposed The optimization method used was a simulated annealing algo-
approach also outperforms Bochtis results. rithm that was configured to calculate the optimal solution by test-
ing various possible configurations as rapidly as possible. The
configuration that exhibited the best performance was selected
4. Conclusions to validate the approach. In other words, the approach was vali-
dated by solving several illustrative problems and evaluating the
A very general approach to address a broad range of agricultural reasoning behind each result. The validation tests showed that
route planning problems has been proposed and developed in this the optimal routes may vary considerably depending on the fea-
study. The proposed approach addresses route planning with more tures of the fleet vehicles, the variability of the field, the need of
than one vehicle, with the same or different features, taking into refilling and the optimization criteria selected.
consideration the variability of the field (e.g., weed patches distri- Additionally, some tests were conducted to compare the pro-
bution), limited tank capacities and the possibility of refilling, and posed approach to other approaches reported in the literature. To
is able to optimize for different criteria, even simultaneously. The accomplish this, it was necessary to particularize the proposed
proposed study particularizes the tests and some aspects in site- approach to optimize the travelled distance using only one vehicle.
specific weed treatments, although the approach is general and The proposed approach outperformed Bochtis approach by up to
could be applied for other site-specific treatment such as variable 17% and Hameeds approach by 21% (in terms of the distance trav-
rate applications of nitrogen and phytosanitary products. elled on headlands).
Assuming that a crop can ideally be split into as many parallel Finally, the method presented in this article did not consider
tracks in the crop row direction as are required to cover the entire terrain elevation maps and accurate fuel consumption, this issue
could be improved by using the model presented in Gonzalez-de-
Table 12
soto et al. (2015). Additionally, the proposed approach could be
Results obtained by Bochtis approach and the proposed approach of this study. extended to address the following: (a) unusual but real cases, such
as those where transitions do not fit into Dubins curves (Shkel and
Bochtis approach Proposed approach
Lumelsky, 2001), which includes the case where the shortest tran-
Field Total Headland Total Headland sition crosses through the field (see Fig. 13a); and (b) cases where
distance (m) distance (m) distance (m) distance (m)
fields are composed of several crops connected by roads. To effec-
1 335.767 95.767 334.439 94.439 tively plan routes through a field like this, the transitions between
2.1 1835.916 235.916 1835.491 235.491
the tracks of different parcels following the existing inter-track
2.2 656.451 176.451 626.027 146.027
2.3 1006.451 166.451 985.602 145.602 roads must be considered (Fig. 13b).

Table 13
Solutions obtained by Bochtis approach and the proposed approach of this study.

Field Bochtis solution track order Proposed approach solution track order
1 (1, 4, 7, 3, 6, 8, 5, 2) (1, 4, 7, 3, 6, 2, 5, 8)
2.1 (20, 17, 14, 11, 8, 12, 9, 3, 6, 2, 5, 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 15, 18) (20, 17, 14, 11, 8, 5, 2, 6, 3, 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 9, 12, 16, 19, 15, 18)
2.2 (1, 5, 11, 7, 3, 9, 2, 6, 10, 4, 8, 12) (1, 4, 10, 7, 3, 6, 2, 5, 8, 11, 9, 12)
2.3 (2, 6, 10, 4, 8, 12, 9, 3, 7, 11, 5, 1) (2, 5, 3, 6, 9, 12, 10, 7, 11, 8, 4, 1)
218 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220

Fig. 11. Comparison of the (a, c, e) routes identified by the Bochtis approach (Bochtis and Vougioukas, 2008) and the (b, d, f) routes identified by the proposed approach.
 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220 219

Fig. 12. Comparison of (a) the routes obtained by Hameeds approach (Hameed et al., 2011) and (b) the routes obtained by the proposed approach.

(a) (b)

Fig. 13. (a) Shortest transitions across a crop; and (b) a field composed of several crops.
220 J. Conesa-Muoz et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 127 (2016) 204220
Acknowledgments
The Spanish Government and the European Union have pro-
vided full and continuing support of this research work through
projects AGL2014-52465-C4-3-R and UE - CP - IP245986 2
(RHEA).
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