Abstract
Selecting harvesting equipment for greatest capacity is often a compromise between excess capacity for some years and too limited capacity for others. We expected that the harvester capacity producing the highest long-run profit would also produce a higher year-to-year variability of profit than would a larger-capacity machine which would also produce a lower long-run profit. To balance the long-run profit against the higher risk, the decision- maker needs a measure of the risk involved.
Simulating production systems is an effective way to develop decision-making information. Trans forming observations of the behavior of real-world systems into the kind of information which can form a basis for decisions is a challenging task in agri cultural-production systems. This paper discusses a harvesting and transportation system simulator that can help the decision-maker to determine the size and amount of machinery needed to complete a har vesting operation in a given amount of time.
Inputs to the model include the size and number of fields and their distance from a farm elevator, elevator and storage-bin sizes, combine and truck sizes, and certain timeliness factors such as dryer time and trips per day to market. The simulator was tested and found to be logically correct.
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