GEOPAL · GNSS-based Planning system for Agricultural Logistics

Modern agriculture is at the stage of industrial production requiring high precision farming tools to organise the joint work on a field and the transportation of agricultural goods. Farms merge into bigger cooperatives in order afford the complex and more powerful machines and in the end increase their competitivity.The GeoPAL project will significantly contribute to frame and steer the development of “smarter” and “greener” in-field and inter-field transport systems in bio-production, taking the advantages provided by the high accuracy of the European GNSS navigation functions. The overall aim of GeoPAL is to provide an advanced logistics system for the harvesting and distribution functions of the bio-production related supply chains by the integration of cross cutting issues such as improvement of resource efficiency, improvement of GHG emissions balance, concerns of sustainable production, industrialisation/automation of production, and further development of the competitiveness attained by the European industries in the global market. The application will build on existing modules pre-developed by the partners to design a new prototype including:- fleet management and logistics (operations management tools and the required ICT systems)- coordination, mission and route planning functionalities for field machinery- closed loop integrated optimal planning, execution of automated field operations, and monitoringThe prototype is planned to be further upgraded after the project duration to be launched on the market. The idea of the project is to fully assess the market potential of the software to prepare for market uptake.GeoPAL will be led by the market leader CLAAS Agrosystems, and will bring in the experience of 2 SMEs, LACOS (specialist in guidance, navigation software), LEE (specialist in bioenergy and agricultural cooperative) and the Biosystems Engineering Dept. of University of Aarhus (specialist in operations management systems in bio-production).