A Simple Greedy Heuristic for Site Specific Management Zone Problem

Abstract

In agriculture, the soil properties influence the productivity and quality of crops. The farmer expects that in a specific area of the land, the physicochemical characteristics of the soil will be homogeneous as the selected crop has the desired quality and minimizes the use of fertilizers. There are three approaches to determining the correct delimitation of the land in the state-of-the art. The first one (k-means and fuzzy k-means) is impractical for current agricultural technology. The second approach is based on integer linear programming and a pre-processing step. This approach limits the shapes of delimited zones to rectangular, and the third approach extends the solution search space and generates orthogonal regions using Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA). In this work, we generate orthogonal regions with a different approach to the EDA, a greedy construction heuristic. Our heuristic produces feasible solutions with a reasonable running time compared with the running times of EDA.