The Use of GPS Systems for Agricultural Machinery Management

The working times and paths of agricultural machinery have been studied to acquire information useful for optimizing machinery use and logistics. In the management of agricultural machinery, the efficiency of mechanical operations is reduced by the auxiliary and travel times, the surveying of which requires the presence of an operator. The research involved the installation on a tractor, used for ploughing, of a Geographical Positioning System for the acquisition and memorizing of the space-time parameters of location. The information obtained was integrated with a Geographical Information System (GIS) for a geo-referenced analysis of the mechanical operations. The calculation methods, used in the study of the machine working times, were implemented in the GIS with specifically devised algorithms