ASABE Technical Library - Abstract

Abstract. Biomass bales after formation were scattered on the field and producers often aggregate them into stacks before transporting these bales to an outlet for consumption or delivery to industrial applications. Efficiency improvement in this infield bale logistics, such as finding optimum location for the bale stacks, will be beneficial. To address this an R simulation program involving five methods (field middle, middle data range, centroid, geometric median, and medoid) for field stack location and a direct aggregation to the outlet named “origin” were developed. These methods were evaluated against field areas for infield bale logistics distances (aggregation, transport, and total). Aggregation assumed using a single bale handling tractor and transport using a trailer/wagon handling 6-bales/trip. Results indicated for aggregation that geometric median was the best, followed by field middle or centroid, middle data range, medoid, and finally origin. Methods aggregation were about 76% and transport about 24% of the total (for >2 ha); and total distance were about 65% of the origin. ANOVA, excluding origin. Even though ANOVA indicated that several areas (≤11.8%) produced significant differences among the methods (p < 0.05) for the areas studied (0.5 to 520 ha), aggregation and total logistics excluding origin for the 6-bales/trip transport were not different. The field middle method was recommended as an easy and practical, and a power model described well (R² > 0.99) its logistics distances.