Some more notes about contemporary fleet management software follow the previous post.

One of the problem spaces in Fleet management deserves a special mention. This is one where fleet is comprised of vehicles with varying purposes and require a great deal of maintenance. Agricultural fleet management is often considered a concern for farmers or machine contractors. It involves resource allocation, scheduling, routing, and real-time monitoring of vehicles and materials. In order to optimize this management task, fleet management tasks are used for decision support to improve scheduling, routing, and other operational measures for a fleet of agricultural machines. Additionally, this fleet management involves the process of supervising the use and maintenance of machines. The scheduling and routing problems are also heterogeneous. Since the deployment of this fleet is for the purposes of agricultural productivity, operational efficiency is a suitable metric which measures the ration between the actual in-field productivity and the maximum theoretical productivity defined by the maximum operating speed and the maximum working width. It is important to maintain a high efficiency as the non-productive time elements provide a greater proportion of loss in potential machine production. Tractors, combine harvesters and other machinery items radically changed the nature of field operations towards more automation, both in terms of technology and management measures. A combination of factors such as shift from larger to smaller machines, and more intelligent robotics has introduced new capabilities such as establishing and nurturing plants at an individual level. This opportunity to modernize large and small machines in this domain comes with a new requirement for scheduling, monitoring and on-line coordination of multiple vehicles.

The fleet management problem differs from drones in a warehouse by virtue of the interactivity required from the farmer or machine operators. This requires real-time asset management focusing on current fleet locations and the prediction of planned tasks. One of the challenges facing this problem space is the lower general user acceptance that has even inhibited the use of fleet management software into agricultural usage.

Agricultural fleet must involve operations of configurations of teams of identical machines, co-operative machines or machines in co-operation with laborers. Farmers require optimized decision making regarding resource allocation, scheduling routing, real-time monitoring of vehicles and materials and timely field operations or customer orders. Transport control, route guidance in connection with visiting customers, invoicing, data acquisition and other such operations are in focus. Farmers voice requests for more on-farm functionalities such as on-line monitoring and routing.