Grass forage transportation process modeling
2020
Valge, A., Federal Scientific Agroengineering Centre VIM, Moscow (Russian Federation) | Sukhoparov, A., Institute for Engineering and Environmental Problems in Agricultural Production - IEEP, Tyarlevo, Pushkinsky distr., St. Petersburg (Russian Federation) | Papushin, E., Federal Scientific Agroengineering Centre VIM, Moscow (Russian Federation)
The grass forage production, silage making in particular, on the farms in the North-West of Russia involves quite many vehicles for field-to-storage transportation of mown and air-cured grass. The share of relevant operating costs is 53−65 % of the total costs, while the energy inputs account for 59−75 %. Therefore, an urgent task is to simulate the traffic flows and to search for the rational transportation options with due account for the forage land area, grass yield, number and capacity of storages, and the distance between the harvesting and storage places. The transportation problem in silage making was solved by the linear programming method through seeking the extreme point of the objective function – the least transport works. For calculation, the source data were processed and summarised in tabular matrices according to the developed algorithm. Two harvesting options of grass for silage were considered: in the first option the grass was ready for harvesting on all the fields at the same time; the second option had different grass maturing time. The problem solving resulted in an optimal transport work plan for silage making in the form of a network diagram, which allowed to schedule the forage land harvesting and to sequence the filling up the storage facilities in compliance with the agrotechnical time limits. This approach was tested for several farms in the North-West region of Russia and 4 to 15 % lower transport works were obtained.
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