Corn planting and harvest scheduling under storage capacity and growing degree units uncertainty

Abstract

Planting and harvest scheduling is a crucial part of crop production due to its significant impact on other factors such as balancing the capacities for harvest, yield potential, sales price, storage, and transportation. Corn planting and harvest scheduling is challenging because corn hybrids have different planting windows, and, subsequently, inaccurate planting and harvest scheduling can result in inconsistent and unpredictable weekly harvest quantities and logistical and productivity issues. In the 2021 Syngenta Crop Challenge, participants were given several large datasets including recorded historical daily growing degree units (GDU) of two sites and provided with planting windows, required GDUs, and harvest quantities of corn hybrids planted in these two sites, and were asked to schedule planting and harvesting dates of corn hybrids under two storage capacity cases so that facilities are not over capacity in harvesting weeks and have consistent weekly harvest quantities. The research problem includes determining the planting and harvest scheduling of corn hybrids under two storage capacity cases: (1) given the maximum storage capacity, and (2) without maximum storage capacity to determine the lowest storage capacity for each site. To help improve corn planting and harvest scheduling, we propose two mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models and a heuristic algorithm to solve this problem for both storage capacity cases. Daily GDUs are required for planting and harvest scheduling, but they are unknown at the beginning of the growing season. As such, we use recurrent neural networks to predict the weekly GDUs of 70 weeks and consider this as the predicted GDU scenario to solve this problem. In addition, we solve this problem considering all given 10 historical GDU scenarios from 2010 to 2019 together for both storage capacity cases to include historical GDUs directly to our model rather than using predicted GDUs. Our extensive computational experiments and results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, which can provide optimal planting and harvest scheduling considering deterministic GDU scenario and uncertainties in historical GDU scenarios for both storage capacity cases to provide consistent weekly harvest quantities that are below the maximum capacity.