A Joint Optimization Model for Dispatching Straw Balers and Transporters in Sustainable Agriculture

As sustainable agriculture continues to develop, straw recycling has become an effective step for conserving agricultural residues. In practice, farmers submit recycling requests to an enterprise, which then dispatches balers before arranging transporters. This sequential planning process creates delays between baling and transportation and increases total costs. A synchronized baling transportation framework is developed in this study. A joint optimization model is formulated to minimize total costs, and a Branch and Bound Algorithm strengthened with strong valid inequalities is developed to solve it. Numerical experiments using data from Heilongjiang, China, show that the proposed approach obtains high-quality solutions within reasonable computation times and lowers total cost. This study offers a practical method for the operation and management of straw recycling enterprises.