Transfer of Manure from Livestock Farms to Crop Fields as Fertilizer using an Ant Inspired Approach

06/05/2020
by   Andreas Kamilaris, et al.
3

Intensive livestock production might have a negative environmental impact, by producing large amounts of animal excrements, which, if not properly managed, can contaminate nearby water bodies with nutrient excess. However, if animal manure is exported to distant crop fields, to be used as organic fertilizer, pollution can be mitigated. It is a single-objective optimization problem, in regards to finding the best solution for the logistics process of satisfying nutrient crops needs by means of livestock manure. This paper proposes a dynamic approach to solve the problem, based on a decentralized nature-inspired cooperative technique, inspired by the foraging behavior of ants (AIA). Results provide important insights for policy-makers over the potential of using animal manure as fertilizer for crop fields, while AIA solves the problem effectively, in a fair way to the farmers and well balanced in terms of average transportation distances that need to be covered by each livestock farmer. Our work constitutes the first application of a decentralized AIA to this interesting real-world problem, in a domain where swarm intelligence methods are still under-exploited.

READ FULL TEXT

page 2

page 4

page 5

page 7

research
06/14/2020

Transfer of Manure as Fertilizer from Livestock Farms to Crop Fields: The Case of Catalonia

Intensive livestock production might have a negative environmental impac...
research
04/03/2017

On the idea of a new artificial intelligence based optimization algorithm inspired from the nature of vortex

In this paper, the idea of a new artificial intelligence based optimizat...
research
02/10/2020

Dynamic Impact for Ant Colony Optimization algorithm

This paper proposes an extension method for Ant Colony Optimization (ACO...
research
09/28/2021

Cooperative Object Transportation using Gibbs Random Fields

This paper presents a novel methodology that allows a swarm of robots to...
research
06/21/2023

Decentralized Aerial Transportation and Manipulation of a Cable-Slung Payload With Swarm of Agents

With the advent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Micro Aerial Vehic...
research
06/07/2022

Chemistry-Inspired Pattern Formation with Robotic Swarms

Self-organized emergent patterns can be widely seen in particle interact...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset