Mission Scheduling During the 2023 Season
IFS - Intelligent Flight Scheduler
Overview
One of the most important elements of a successful Taranis service is the timing of our missions. If missions are taking place too early, the imagery outputs will not provide the required data and will limit the ability to deliver meaningful insights. If missions are taking place too late, the ability to act upon the delivered information and insights will be time-limited.
Taranis continues to develop its comprehensive technology, named Intelligent Flight Scheduler, geared to optimize our serviceability by arriving at the field at the right time from an agronomic perspective for the first mission and continue with a predefined schedule for later ones. The IFS implementation considers many factors and use cases, and provides a unified model which reliably schedules Taranis flights.
The technology is providing accurate mission scheduling for several crop types, including Soybean, Corn and Cotton, as well as many other crops that are being serviced.
To perform the most accurate scheduling decisions for the first mission, IFS is utilizing a proven stage growth model, provided by ClearAG by DTN: https://www.dtn.com/agriculture/agribusiness/clearag/.
Utilizing the stage growth model, followed by a predefined schedule, the Taranis team, including Customer Success, Product Management and Agronomy staff, identified the best timing for each flight, and according to this logic missions are scheduled.
General Guidelines
All missions are created and scheduled in advance
For each field, IFS will schedule all the missions in advance, prior to the beginning of the season and based on the planting date provided, to take place at the optimal crops’ phenological stage for its first mission followed by a predefined schedule. For example,
Corn:
Soybean:
Operational Guidelines
- Minimal time between flights; IFS will not allow for early/late missions to be performed less than 7 days apart. It will also help prevent redundant information.
- IFS will not schedule/reschedule missions in the next 3 days, at every point in time, to allow and support operational readiness and preparation time.
Mission Scheduling
IFS schedules a target date for each of the missions. Considering operational situations on the ground, the pilot and Operations team can decide to change the schedule date by 1-2 days prior or later from the original scheduled date.
Crop information requirement
IFS will not schedule flights missions for fields that do not have information about the crop in the field. The goal is to avoid flying unseeded fields.
Planting date information requirement
In most cases, the planting date information is crucial for calculating and creating the flights. This is currently the case for all Corn, Soybean and Cotton fields that are part of our full-service plans. Without the planting date, IFS cannot accurately predict the best time to fly those fields and will wait with flight scheduling until the information is provided.
Future forecast limitations
As with all stage growth models, the ability to predict and forecast future conditions is limited. For example, the model could have predicted that the Corn at a specific field would arrive at V1 at the beginning of May, however a cold wave hit the area and it was delayed by a week. Similarly and on the opposite scale, the model could have predicted V3 will be by the end of May, however the weather was warmer than expected and by the scheduled flight time the crop is already in the late stages of V4.
Implementation
Below you can find a detailed description of the rules for each type of crop and operation mode.
Relative Maturity / Hybrid / Variety
We are using relative maturity of Corn and Soybean to make the IFS model more accurate in relation to the timing of the flights throughout the season.
The model will get the maturity for the crop, set up by the user through crop variety for the field cycle. In case this wasn't set, we use a default maturity according to the field location and the state default maturity:
In any other use case, we use the default maturity set by DTN, which can be found here:
Schedule of Missions by Crop
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